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Pork, Roast, Apple Sauce for

Apple sauce made with apples, brown sugar, water, and butter, cooked until tender, served warm with roast pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pork, Roast, Apple Sauce for

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the apples.

  2. Place the apples in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and ½ cup of water. Stir well with a wooden spoon.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of butter.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook until the apples are tender but not too soft or brown.

  2. Serve the sauce warm.

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 + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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
Form the body of the sauce, softening into a soft purée as they cook.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and caramel-like depth to the apples.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, rich flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until the apples are tender but not too soft or brown. Apples keep their shape and give a pleasant texture when cooked gently; overcooking breaks them down completely and high heat can scorch the sugar and make the sauce brown and bitter.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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