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Sweet Pickled Apples

A sweet pickled apple preserve made by boiling apples in a sugar, vinegar, and spice mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, combine sugar, vinegar, water, cloves, mace, and nutmeg in a spice bag.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Cook the apples

  1. Add the quartered apples and boil until the fruit looks clear.

  2. Choose apples that do not break easily.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out water.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sugar and helps preserve the fruit.
Apples
The main fruit; cooking softens its flesh while the syrup flavours it.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the apples until the fruit looks clear. Heat softens the fruit's cell walls and pectin gradually. Boiling too long makes the quarters collapse into mush, while stopping too early leaves them firm and opaque.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, clove, nutmeg, apple. 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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