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Dessert

Apple Butter

Apple butter is a thick, sweet apple pulp made by boiling apples in cider until reduced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Apple Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Reduce the cider

  1. Boil the cider until reduced to half its original quantity.

Cook the apples

  1. Pare, core, and slice enough apples to measure 2.5 bushels.

  2. Add the apples to the cider and let them boil, stirring constantly.

  3. Cook until the mixture is a smooth, thick pulp, which will take 9 to 12 hours.

  4. Be careful not to let it scorch.

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. Cider + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cider
Provides the liquid base and its sweet, tart flavor, which concentrates as it reduces.
Apples
Break down into pulp that gives the butter its body, sweetness, and fruit flavor.

The step that matters

Stir constantly and avoid scorching. Apple sugars and pulp settle on the bottom of a wide pot during long cooking and burn easily. Constant stirring spreads the heat and keeps the mixture from sticking, which would otherwise add a burnt taste to the whole batch.

“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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