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Dessert

Dried Apple Butter

A spread made from dried apples, sugar, spices, citrus juices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Dried Apple Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Wash the dried apples thoroughly and soak them overnight.

  2. In the morning, cook the apples in plenty of water until well done.

  3. Rub the cooked apples through a sieve or colander.

Finish the butter

  1. Add sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, orange juice, and butter to the apple mixture.

  2. Cook slowly until the mixture drops heavily from a spoon.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apples
Provide the fruit base that cooks down into a thick, spreadable purée.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the finished butter its body as it reduces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, rounder mouthfeel in the finished spread.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the mixture drops heavily from a spoon. Cooking gently lets water evaporate and the purée thicken without scorching the sugars. Heating too fast can burn the bottom and leave the texture uneven.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, butter, egg. 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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