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Dessert

Baked Apples

A baked apple dish with sugar, clove, cinnamon, butter, and honey or sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

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. Peel and core the apples.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the cavities of the apples with sugar, a clove, a pinch of cinnamon, and a bit of butter.

  2. Place the apples in a baking dish and pour hot water and honey or sugar around them.

  3. Bake carefully until tender.

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. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Apple + honeytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Soften as they bake and hold their shape while becoming tender and juicy.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps create a syrupy, browned sauce in the dish.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the filling and carries the spice flavours.
Honey or sugar
Sweetens the liquid around the apples and adds to the syrup that forms as they bake.

The step that matters

Bake carefully until tender. Apples can split or turn to mush if overbaked, while underbaking leaves them firm and starchy. Checking for tenderness with a knife helps the flesh cook evenly and keep its shape.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, cinnamon, butter, honey):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cinnamon, butter, honey. 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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