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Dessert

Preserved Apples for Winter Use

Preserved apples are stewed apples with sugar, lemon juice, water, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Preserved Apples for Winter Use

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the pippins.

Stew and serve

  1. Combine 1 pound of apples with ½ pound of sugar and ¼ quart of water, along with a few cloves and the thin rind and juice of a lemon.

  2. Stew until clear.

  3. Serve with 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. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Pippins
Apples provide the bulk and fruit flavour of the preserve.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture.
Lemon juice
Acidity brightens the flavour and helps keep the apples from dulling.

The step that matters

Stew until clear. Stewing must go long enough for the sugar to dissolve and the apples to soften and turn translucent. Stopping early leaves the fruit firm and the syrup thin, so the preserve will not keep as well.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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