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Baked Sweet Apples

Apples boiled with brown sugar until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 Sweet Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and wipe a pailful of sweet apples. Place them in a porcelain kettle with enough cold water to come halfway up the apples. Cover.

Cook and sweeten

  1. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

  2. Check softness with a fork. Turn down the upper side of the apples on top.

  3. If softened, sprinkle 1 cup of brown sugar over them. Cover.

  4. Boil for another hour. For very large apples, boil for an additional 30 minutes.

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

Sweet apples
Soften slowly in simmering water, becoming tender and moist as their cell walls break down.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavour as it cooks into the apples.

The step that matters

Check softness before adding the sugar. Sugar slows the softening of fruit tissue, so the apples should be tested with a fork and found tender before the sugar goes in.

“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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