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Dessert

Iced Apples

A dessert of boiled apples filled with jelly and served chilled with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Iced Apples

12 apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare and core the apples, leaving them whole.

  2. Place the apples in a stew pan and cover with water.

  3. Stew until you can pierce them with a straw.

  4. Remove from heat and let cool in a dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Fill the center of each apple with jelly.

  2. Ice the apples as you would a cake.

  3. Serve in a glass dish with cream or custard.

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 + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Currant + creamtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,829 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Firm apples
Hold their shape during stewing, giving a firm, whole fruit body under the filling.
Currant jelly or other jelly
Adds sweetness and a bright, tart fruit flavour to the hollowed centre of each apple.
Cream or custard
Adds richness and fat that softens the tartness of the stewed apple.

The step that matters

Stew until you can pierce them with a straw. Apples that are undercooked stay hard and resist piercing, while overcooking makes them collapse and lose their whole shape. Firm apples need enough heat for the pectin and cell walls to soften evenly without breaking down.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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