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Dessert

A Nich Dessert Dish

A baked apple dessert made by layering sliced apples with sugar, adding water, baking, and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

A Nich Dessert Dish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. In a quart bowl, layer the sliced apples and sugar alternately, then add the water on top.

  2. Cover the bowl with a saucer and weigh it down.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for three hours.

  2. Let it cool completely before turning it out.

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

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

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 fruit that softens into a tender, spoonable base as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and draws out juice that helps form a syrup as they cook.
Water
Adds moisture that helps the apples steam and soften evenly in the covered bowl.

The step that matters

Cover and weigh down the bowl. The saucer and weight keep the apples pressed under their own syrup and steam trapped, so they cook evenly instead of drying or browning unevenly on top.

“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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