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Dessert

Transparent Apple

A clear apple jelly made by boiling apples, straining the juice, adding sugar, and setting in molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Transparent Apple

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Boil the tart ripe apples in ½ cup of water until soft.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth to extract the juice.

Set the jelly

  1. Add 1 pound of white sugar to the pint of juice.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches a jelly-like consistency.

  3. Pour into molds and let cool.

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

Tart ripe apples
Provide pectin and acid, which help the juice gel as it cools.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and, when boiled down, helps the juice set into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Boil until jelly-like consistency. Underboiling leaves the juice runny because the sugar and pectin have not concentrated enough to gel. Overboiling makes the jelly stiff and can cause sugar to crystallize.

“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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