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Dessert

Apple Trifle

A dessert of stewed apples with orange and quince peel, sugar, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Apple Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel, core, and quarter the apples.

Stew and sweeten

  1. Stew the apples with the orange peel, quince peel, and enough water to cover the bottom of the pan.

  2. Add sugar in the proportion of ½ pound for every pound of fruit.

Finish and serve

  1. When cooked, press the pulp through a sieve and let it cool.

  2. Dish the pulp and cover it with 1 pint of whipped cream flavored with lemon peel.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Orange + quincetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tart apples
Provide the main fruit pulp that forms the body of the trifle.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple pulp and balances the tartness of the fruit.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, airy, rich layer that contrasts with the smooth pulp.

The step that matters

Pressing the pulp through a sieve. Cooked apples must be fully softened before sieving, or the pulp stays lumpy and grainy. Letting it cool before adding cream keeps the whipped cream from deflating and turning loose.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, orange, quince, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, orange, quince, sugar, cream. 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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