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Dessert

Apple Turnovers

Apple turnovers are pastry squares filled with boiled green apple mixture, dusted with sugar, served hot or cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Apple Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the green apples with sugar, cinnamon, butter, and lemon juice until soft.

Shape the turnovers

  1. Make a pastry dough and roll it thin.

  2. Cut the rolled dough into squares.

  3. Fill each square with the boiled apple mixture and fold into triangles.

Bake and serve

  1. Dust the turnovers with sugar.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot or cold with cream.

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Green apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and becomes sweet-tart when cooked.
Pastry dough
Forms the flaky outer shell that bakes golden around the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the dusted surface brown.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture to the cooked apple filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and keeps it from tasting flat.

The step that matters

Fold the turnovers tightly. If the edges are not sealed well, the hot apple juices can leak out and make the pastry soggy or burst during baking. Let the filling cool a little and keep it modest in amount so the seal holds.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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