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Apple Pork

A pork fillet stewed with apples, sugar, lemon, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Rub the pork fillet with salt and pepper.

  2. Score the outside skin and remove the bone.

Make the apple filling

  1. Fill the cavity with stewed apples seasoned with nutmeg, sugar, and lemon rind.

  2. Peel, core, and slice or quarter the remaining apples, sweeten with sugar, and add a little lemon juice.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the pork in a large pot or iron baking dish and surround it with the cut apples.

  2. Add enough water to prevent burning.

  3. Stew or bake for 3 hours.

  4. Serve hot on a clean dish.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Pork + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork fillet
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender and juicy during long, slow cooking.
Apples
Soften during stewing to add moisture and a sweet, tart flavour that balances the pork.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and adds to their flavour as they cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Add enough water to prevent burning. A long stew or bake of three hours can dry out or scorch the bottom of the dish. Enough liquid keeps the pot moist and lets the heat cook the pork and apples evenly.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, lemon. 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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