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Buttered Apples. Pommes Au Beurre.

Apples cooked in sugar syrup, filled with butter, glazed with sifted sugar, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Buttered Apples. Pommes Au Beurre.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Core and peel 9 or 10 apples.

  2. Cook apples in light sugar syrup until nearly ready, then drain them.

  3. Make marmalade from remaining apple scraps.

Assemble

  1. Spread a little marmalade on a dish.

  2. Arrange the apples on the dish.

  3. Fill the cores of the apples with butter.

  4. Use remaining marmalade to fill gaps between the apples.

Glaze and bake

  1. Glaze the apples with sifted sugar.

  2. Place them in the oven until they are nicely colored.

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

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Apples
Form the main body of the dish and hold their shape while cooking.
Sugar
Forms the light syrup for cooking the apples and adds sweetness to the glaze.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the cores, enriching flavor and moisture.

The step that matters

Place them in the oven until they are nicely colored. Sugar glaze browns through caramelization and the Maillard reaction, which happen quickly at high heat. Watching for even color prevents burning the sugar before the apples are heated through.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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