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Apple Sweetmeats

Preserved apples cooked in a sugar syrup and stored in jars.

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 ↓

Apple Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. Weigh the apples and measure ½ pound of sugar for each pound of apples.

Make the syrup and cook the apples

  1. In a pot, combine 2 quarts of water with 3 pounds of sugar to make a syrup and bring it to a boil.

  2. Drop in enough apples to cover the surface of the kettle and cook slowly until clear.

  3. Fill glass jars half full with the cooked apples and keep them warm.

  4. Continue adding more apples to the syrup until you have cooked 6 pounds.

Jar

  1. Place each jar into a saucepan of boiling water, fill with boiling syrup, and screw on the covers immediately.

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

Apples
Provide the fruit that is cooked until clear and becomes the preserved sweetmeat.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens the syrup the apples cook in.

The step that matters

Filling jars with boiling syrup and sealing at once. Hot syrup and hot jars drive out air and help the lids seal as the contents cool. Letting the jars or syrup cool before covering can leave the seal incomplete and the sweetmeats at risk of spoiling.

“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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