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Dessert

Apple Gateau

A gelatinized apple dessert made with apples, sugar, lemon, gelatin, and served chilled with custard or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Gateau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Mix the Gelatine with cold water.

Cook the apples

  1. Slice the apples and place them in a saucepan.

  2. Add sugar, hot water, lemon zest, and lemon juice to the apples.

  3. Cook slowly until the apples are tender.

  4. Strain the cooked apples through a sieve.

Set and serve

  1. Add the dissolved Gelatine and red food coloring to the apple mixture.

  2. Cool the mixture.

  3. Pour the cooled mixture into a glass dish.

  4. Refrigerate for four hours.

  5. Serve with custard or cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Cox's gelatine
Sets the liquid apple mixture into a wobbly, sliceable dessert when chilled.
Apples
Provide the main flavour and body, softening into a pulp when cooked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the apples and lemon.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweet apple flavour.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before pouring it into the dish. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, so if the hot mixture is poured in before it cools slightly, or the gelatine is not fully dissolved and evenly mixed in, the dessert may set unevenly or not at all.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cream. 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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