Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Normandy Pippins

A sweet stew of Normandy pippins cooked with cinnamon, ginger, sugar, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stewed Normandy Pippins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the pippins and soak them in 1 quart of water with cinnamon and ginger for 12 hours.

Stew

  1. In a stewpan, combine the soaked pippins, water, sliced lemon, and half of the sugar.

  2. Boil slowly until the pippins are half done, then add the remaining sugar.

  3. Simmer until the pippins are completely tender.

Serve

  1. Serve in glass dishes for dessert.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Normandy pippins
Provide the fruit that softens into the dish's tender body during stewing.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fruit take on a syrupy, rich flavour as it cooks.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the stewed fruit.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until the pippins are half done, then add the remaining sugar. Boiling too hard can break the fruit apart before it turns tender. Adding sugar in two portions lets the fruit soften first, so the sugar does not firm the outer flesh too early and slow the cooking.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, ginger, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes