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Dessert

Dried Apple Sauce

A sauce made by soaking dried apples in hot water, cooking, mashing, and seasoning with optional lemon peel, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Dried Apple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the apples

  1. Wash the dried apples.

  2. Pour enough hot water over them to cover.

  3. Let them soak overnight.

Cook and season

  1. In the morning, place the soaked apples and their water into a kettle.

  2. Add more water if necessary.

  3. Cook until the apples are soft.

  4. Mash them.

  5. Stew some slices of lemon peel with the apples.

  6. Season with cinnamon or nutmeg.

  7. Sweeten to taste.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Dried apples
Provide the main fruit body, which softens and breaks down into the sauce.
Hot water
Rehydrates the dried apples during soaking and provides liquid for cooking them soft.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the apples.

The step that matters

Cook until the apples are soft. Dried apples need enough liquid and time to rehydrate fully; if they are undercooked, the sauce stays grainy and tough. Adding water as needed keeps them from scorching while they soften.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, cinnamon, nutmeg, 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.

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