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Dessert

Apple Dessert

A baked apple dessert with quince jelly or lemon sugar, served on bread and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apple Dessert

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a rather quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Pare the apples and remove the cores.

  3. Fill the cavities with quince jelly, lemon-flavored sugar, or grated pineapple and sugar.

  4. Place each filled apple on a slice of bread.

  5. Moisten the apples with quince jelly dissolved in water, lemon juice, or pineapple juice.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the apples closely and bake until tender.

  2. Serve with whipped cream and sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Quince + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Large tart apples
Provide the main body of the dessert, softening into tender fruit as they bake.
Quince jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity flavor to the filling and moistening liquid.
Slices of bread
Act as a base under each apple, soaking up juices as they bake.
Whipped cream
Adds a cool, rich contrast to the warm baked apples.

The step that matters

Cover the apples closely while baking. Covering traps steam around the apples so they cook through and become tender without drying out before the flesh softens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, quince, sugar, bread, 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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