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Frozen Apple Sauce

A frozen apple sauce made by cooking apples with sugar, water, cider, lemon juice, and salt, then freezing the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cider 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 ↓

Frozen Apple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Wipe, pare, core, and cut the apples into quarters.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the apples with salt, sugar, and water until soft.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Stir in the cider and lemon juice.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture until it reaches a mushy consistency.

  2. Serve in cups made of bright red apples.

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. Apple + cidertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

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

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

  5. Cider + lemontop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together986 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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
Provide the main body and flavor of the sauce once cooked and pureed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the apples and lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the apples from tasting flat.
Cider
Adds extra apple flavor and liquid to the sauce.

The step that matters

Freeze until mushy, not solid. Partial freezing with stirring or close checking keeps ice crystals small, so the sauce stays soft and spoonable. Freezing it fully makes it hard and icy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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