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Dessert

Baked Apples

A baked fruit dish of sliced apples layered with stewed plums, sugar, and butter, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. 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. Butter a baking dish.

  3. Peel and thinly slice the apples.

Layer and bake

  1. Layer the apple slices in the dish, followed by a layer of stewed plums.

  2. Sprinkle sugar over the layers.

  3. Repeat the layering until the dish is full.

  4. Bake until the fruit is tender.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream around the dish.

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 + plumtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Plum + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together710 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the main fruit body that softens and becomes tender when baked.
Stewed plums
Add moisture and concentrated fruit flavour between the apple layers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fruit juices caramelise slightly during baking.
Butter
Greases the dish so the fruit does not stick and adds richness.
Whipped cream
Adds cool, rich fat that contrasts with the warm, tender baked fruit.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, 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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