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Dessert

Pickled Apples

Pickled apples are sweet apples boiled in a vinegar and sugar syrup with cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil vinegar and brown sugar together, then skim the mixture.

  2. Add cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

Cook the apples

  1. Cut sweet apples in halves without peeling them.

  2. Boil the apples in the syrup until soft, but do not let them break.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sweet syrup and helps the apples keep their pickled flavor.
Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup, balancing the vinegar's sharpness.
Sweet apples
Form the main body of the dish, softening in the hot syrup while absorbing its flavor.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the apples until soft, but do not let them break. Heat softens the apple's cell walls and pectin gradually. Boiling too hard or too long breaks the cells down, so the halves turn to mush instead of staying whole and tender.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, allspice):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, allspice. 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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