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Dessert

Jellied Apples

A dessert of boiled apples set in a gelatinous mixture of sugar, lemon juice, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Jellied Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Soak the gelatine in water for 2 hours.

  2. Boil sugar, lemon juice, and water for 10 minutes.

Cook the apples

  1. Add apples, cooking gently until tender enough to pierce with a straw.

  2. Remove apples with a skimmer and spread on a platter.

  3. Continue cooking remaining apples in the same way.

Set and serve

  1. Remove the pan from heat and stir in the dissolved gelatine until nearly cold.

  2. Gently mix in the apples and pour into a mold.

  3. Set the mold on ice to harden.

  4. Serve with sugar and whipped cream.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Gelatine
Sets the cooked syrup and apples into a firm, sliceable jelly.
Tart apples
Provide the fruit body and a tart flavour that balances the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps give the jelly its body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the gelatine until nearly cold. If the gelatine goes into a very hot syrup it can weaken its setting power, and if it is added when already too cold it may set unevenly or in lumps. Cooling it until nearly set lets it thicken the mixture evenly around the apples.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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