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Dessert

Creamed Apples

A dessert of stewed apples with sugar, flour, butter, nut meats, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creamed Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Pare and core the apples without breaking them.

  2. In a stew pan, combine the apples, sugar, flour, and butter.

  3. Stew until the apples are tender.

Make the sauce and fill

  1. Carefully remove the apples and set them aside to cool.

  2. Cook the sauce until thick.

  3. When cold, fill the inside of the apples with nut meats.

  4. Cover with whipped cream and pour the sauce around the fruit.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Apples
Provide the main body of the dish and soften into tender fruit when stewed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form the syrup that coats the apples.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded flavor.
Nut meats
Add crunch and nutty flavor inside the cooled apples.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until thick. Flour thickens only when the liquid reaches a full simmer and is cooked long enough for its starch to swell. Stopping early leaves a thin, pasty sauce, while overcooking can make it stiff or scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, egg, meat, 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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