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Dessert

Stewed Apples, Cream, and Cake

A dish of stewed apples served with cream and cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Stewed Apples, Cream, and Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Pare and core the apples.

  2. In a bake dish, combine water and sugar.

  3. Add the apples and cover the dish.

  4. Cook slowly until the apples are clear and tender, turning them once.

Cool and serve

  1. Let the apples cool in the covered bake dish.

  2. Serve the apples in a glass dish with cream and cake.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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
Soften into tender fruit that holds its shape while cooking gently in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps form the syrup they cook in.
Cream
Adds richness and fat that softens the tart flavour of the cooked apples.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the apples are clear and tender. Gentle heat under a cover lets the cell walls and pectin in the apples soften evenly without breaking apart. Too much heat can turn the fruit to mush, while stopping too early leaves it firm and underdone.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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