Name: Baked Sweet Apples
Ingredients: 8 sweet apples; sugar; ⅔ cup boiling water

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

8 sweet apples
sugar
⅔ cup boiling water

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Wipe, core, and score the apples.
Place them in a baking dish and fill the cavities with sugar.
Add the boiling water.

Bake

Cover the dish and bake for 3 hours at 300°F (150°C), adding more water if necessary.

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.

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

Sugar: Sweetens the apples and dissolves into syrup that coats them as they bake.
Sweet apples: Soften into tender flesh and release juices that combine with the sugar into syrup.
Boiling water: Creates steam and a base liquid that keeps the apples moist during the long bake.

“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.