Skip to main content
Dessert

Spiced Apples

A preserved apple dish made by boiling apples in a spiced vinegar-sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil vinegar, water, sugar, allspice, cloves, and cinnamon bark to make a thin syrup. Skim the syrup well.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the tart apples and boil until they can be pierced easily with a fork.

  2. Put the apples in jars and cover with the syrup.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the spiced syrup as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit's texture and flavor.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the syrup and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil the apples until just pierced with a fork. Overcooking breaks down the pectin and cell walls, so the apples turn mushy. Stopping when a fork pierces them easily keeps them tender but intact.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, allspice, clove, cinnamon. 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes