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Dessert

Apple Preserve

A sweet syrup with cooked apple pieces, sealed in jars.

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

Apple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 quart of sugar with 2 quarts of water. Skim off any foam.

Prepare and cook the apples

  1. Peel, core, and quarter or eighth the apples, placing them in cold water to prevent browning.

  2. Drop a few apple sections at a time into the simmering syrup and cook until tender.

Fill and seal the jars

  1. Carefully skim the apples into jars that are kept warm.

  2. Continue adding more apples to the syrup until the jars are two-thirds full.

  3. Fill the jars with hot syrup and seal them like canned fruit.

  4. Add lemon slices for flavor if desired.

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. Sugar + appletop 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).

Sugar and apple 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

Tart apples
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and forms the body of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Placing the apples in cold water after cutting. Cut apple flesh oxidizes and browns quickly when exposed to air; cold water slows this reaction and keeps the pieces pale.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, apple):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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