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Dessert

Baked Apples

A simple oven-baked apple dish with sugar and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Baked Apples

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the apples in a deep, flat pan.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar over the apples.

  4. Pour the boiling water over the apples.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until they are halfway done, then turn them.

  2. Once done, lift each apple with a fork into a glass dish and pour the syrup over them.

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 main body and soft flesh that becomes tender as they bake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves with the water to form the syrup.

The step that matters

Bake until halfway done, then turn them. Apples heat unevenly in a pan, with the side touching the base cooking faster. Turning them partway through lets heat reach all sides so they soften evenly.

“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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