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A Custard of Apples, with Butter and Citron

A custard of apples cooked with butter, sugar, and grated citron peel, baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Custard of Apples, with Butter and Citron

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and quarter the apples.

  2. In a saucepan, combine apples, butter, sugar, and grated citron peel; cook until half done, then let cool.

Assemble the custard

  1. Prepare the pastry: roll out to 11 inches in diameter and create a 2-inch high edge.

  2. Place half of the cooked apple quarters in a circle at the bottom of the pastry, covering with the butter and sugar syrup.

  3. Arrange the remaining apple quarters on top.

Bake and serve

  1. Wrap the custard with a strip of buttered paper and bake in a clear oven at 350 °F (175 °C) for 45 minutes.

  2. Remove the paper, lightly egg the crust, and bake for a few more minutes.

  3. Sprinkle fine sugar over the crust and ice it. Serve hot with syrup or fruit topping.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Form the bulk of the filling, becoming tender and sweet as they cook in butter and sugar.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and helps the apples brown slightly as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the apples caramelise and form a syrup.
Pastry
Forms the crust that holds the filling and gives a crisp base.

The step that matters

Cooking the apples until half done. Partly cooking the apples before baking softens them and drives off excess moisture, so the custard does not become watery or soggy in the crust. Cooking them fully would make them mushy during the long bake.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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