Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Apples

Apples preserved in a boiled sugar syrup with lemon flavor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Preserved Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Core and peel the apples, then cut them into eighths.

Cook the apples in syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 pound of sugar in ½ pint of water.

  2. Add as many apple pieces as can be boiled without breaking.

  3. Carefully remove the apples when tender.

  4. After all apples are done, add a little more sugar to the syrup and boil for a few minutes.

  5. Flavor the syrup with lemon and pour it over the 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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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 bulk of the preserve and a firm, tender texture when cooked gently in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once dissolved and boiled, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Add apple pieces without breaking them. Apple pieces should be added in only as many as can boil without breaking. Crowding the pan or boiling too hard breaks the fruit apart and makes the texture mushy instead of holding each piece whole.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More preserved apples recipes

with Ginger 5for Tea 3 See all 47 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes