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Dessert

Fried Sour Apples

Fried sour apples cooked in fat and dusted with sugar, served hot as a vegetable.

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 ↓

Fried Sour Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and wipe the apples, then cut them into quarters and remove the cores.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the fat in a frying pan over medium‑high heat until it is smoking hot.

  2. Add the apples to the pan and fry them until brown, turning carefully to prevent breaking.

  3. Just before they are fully brown, dust the apples with sugar.

  4. Remove the apples from the pan without breaking and serve them hot as a vegetable.

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

Very firm, sound, sour apples
Firm, sour flesh holds its shape when fried and balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Sugar
Dusted on near the end, it caramelises at the surface for sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Dust with sugar just before full browning. Sugar burns quickly at high heat. Adding it just before the apples are fully brown lets it caramelise lightly without turning bitter or dark.

“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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