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Dessert

Dainty Baked Apples

A baked apple dessert with sugar, flour, boiling water, and marshmallows.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Dainty Baked Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel the apples and remove the cores, leaving them whole.

  2. Place the apples in a baking pan and fill the cavities with a mixture of sugar and flour.

Bake

  1. Fill the pan almost halfway with boiling water.

  2. Bake the apples until tender.

Finish

  1. Just before removing from the oven, place a marshmallow in the cavity of each apple and leave in the oven until slightly browned.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  3. Apple + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Apples
Form the structure of the dish and soften into a tender, sweet flesh as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the cavity juices caramelize slightly as they cook.
Flour
Mixed with the sugar in the cavities, it thickens the juices that form as the apples bake.
Marshmallows
Melt and brown on top of the apples, adding a sweet, toasted finish.

The step that matters

Adding the marshmallow at the end. Marshmallows are mostly sugar and melt and brown quickly under heat. Adding them too early lets them melt away into the apple and scorch before the apple is tender, so add them just before removing the apples from the oven.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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