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Dessert

Apples Stewed Whole

Whole apples stewed with lemon juice and rind, served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Apples Stewed Whole

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the apples

  1. Pare the apples and place them in a saucepan with the juice and rind of the lemons.

  2. Cover the apples with water and cook slowly until they can be pierced with a straw.

  3. Remove the apples with a slotted spoon.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by dissolving ½ pound of sugar in the water used to cook the apples.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil.

  3. Add the apples and cook until clear.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the apples, core them, and fill with fruit jelly if desired.

  2. Boil down the syrup and pour it over the apples.

  3. Serve very cold with whipped or plain cream.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. 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

Tart cooking apples
Provide the main body of the dish, holding their shape when cooked slowly in water.
Sugar
Dissolves into the cooking water to make a syrup that sweetens and glazes the apples.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the apples and syrup.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic lemon oils to the cooking liquid, flavouring the apples.

The step that matters

Cook the apples slowly until just pierced. Gentle simmering softens the flesh evenly while keeping the pieces intact. Over-cooking makes apples mushy and they lose their shape when the syrup is added.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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