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Dessert

Apple Dessert

Baked apples filled with quince jelly, lemon-flavored sugar, or grated pineapple, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apple Dessert

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a rather quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare the apples and remove the cores.

  2. Fill the cavities with quince jelly, lemon-flavored sugar, or grated pineapple and sugar.

  3. Place each filled apple on a square of bread on earthen pie plates.

  4. Moisten the apples with quince jelly dissolved in water, lemon juice, or pineapple juice.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover closely and bake at 400°F (200°C) until the apples are tender.

  2. Serve with whipped cream and sugar.

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 + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + pineappletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together530 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Quince + pineappletop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Quince + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Large tart apples
Provide the main body of the dessert, softening into a tender, spoonable flesh when baked.
Quince jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity aroma, and its dissolved form moistens the apples as they bake.
Squares of bread
Sit under each apple to catch the juices and give a soft base as the fruit cooks.
Whipped cream
Adds cool richness and fat that contrasts with the warm, baked apples.

The step that matters

Cover closely and bake until tender. Covering traps steam so the apples cook through evenly and stay moist, while the pieces of bread soak up juices. Checking for tenderness rather than a fixed time keeps the fruit from collapsing into mush.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, quince, sugar, pineapple, bread, 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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