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Dessert

Apple Butter

Apple butter is a thick apple preserve made by slowly cooking apples in cider.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Apple Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Reduce the cider

  1. Boil the cider until reduced to half its original quantity.

Cook the apples

  1. Pare, core, and slice the apples to measure 2.5 bushels.

  2. Add the apples to the cider and let them boil, stirring constantly.

  3. Cook until the apples are reduced to a pulp, which will take 9 to 12 hours.

  4. Continue boiling until the mixture is perfectly smooth and thick.

  5. Avoid scorching the mixture to prevent spoilage.

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. Cider + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cider
Reduced by boiling to concentrate its flavor and form the liquid the apples cook in.
Apples
Break down into pulp that thickens the butter and gives it body as they cook.

The step that matters

Avoid scorching the mixture. Thick, sugar-rich fruit sticks and burns on the bottom of the pot during long cooking. Scorched sugars taste bitter and can spoil the whole batch, so stir constantly and keep the heat controlled.

“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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