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Dessert

Apple Cream

A dessert of baked apples mixed with sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, and thick custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a thick custard and pour it into a glass dish.

  2. Rub the baked apples through a sieve to obtain the pulp.

Make the topping

  1. Mix the apple pulp with the sifted sugar, egg whites, and lemon juice.

  2. Whip the mixture for 1 hour until light and fluffy.

Assemble

  1. Spoon the mixture gently over the custard.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Baked apples
Provide the main fruit pulp, giving the cream its flavour and body.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they lighten the mixture and give it a fluffy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps stabilise the whipped foam.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and helps stabilise the egg white foam.

The step that matters

Whipping the apple and egg white mixture. Egg whites must be whipped until light and fluffy to trap air. Under-whipping leaves a dense, flat topping, while the foam can collapse if it is handled roughly when spooned over the custard.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, lemon. 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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