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Dessert

Apple Butter

Apple butter is a thick, sweetened apple preserve made by cooking apples in cider and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Apple Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Reduce the cider

  1. Boil 12 gallons of cider down to 4 gallons.

  2. Use two kettles: keep one filled while the other boils down.

Cook the apples

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. Add the apples to the cider and boil for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Stir continuously to prevent burning.

Sweeten and seal

  1. After 4 gallons of apple butter is made, add 10 pounds of sugar and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Just before removing from heat, add ground cloves or cinnamon if desired.

  3. Pour into gallon jars and seal with melted beef suet.

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. Cider + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

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

  2. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Cider + clovetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,683 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + beeftop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. 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

Cider
Provides the liquid that is boiled down, concentrating its flavor into the butter.
Apples
Break down during long cooking to form the thick, spreadable body of the butter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it cooks in, helps thicken the butter and give it body.

The step that matters

Stirring continuously. Thick, sugar-rich fruit mixtures scorch easily on the bottom of the kettle during long boiling, and constant stirring prevents the burnt flavor that would spoil the butter.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, apple, sugar, beef):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, apple, sugar, beef. 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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