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Dessert

Black Caps

A baked apple dessert with sugar, wine, lemon, and cloves, finished by blackening the tops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,774 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Black Caps

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Halve and core the apples.

  2. Place the apples in a shallow pan.

  3. Sprinkle white sugar over the apples.

  4. Bake the apples.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the wine and water, then sweeten the sauce.

Stuff and cook

  1. Slice off the stalk end of the apples.

  2. Core the apples without peeling.

  3. Mix sugar with grated lemon and cloves.

  4. Stuff the mixture into the apple holes.

  5. Place the apples flat side down in a stew pan with half raisin wine and half water.

  6. Cover and cook on very low heat.

  7. Baste occasionally with the liquid.

Finish

  1. When done, blacken the tops with a salamander.

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 + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Apple + winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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 soften into a tender, spoonable base as they cook.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apple surfaces take on colour as they cook.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the liquid that cooks and glazes the apples.
Grated lemon
Adds bright aroma and a fresh citrus edge that balances the sweetness.
Cloves
Add warm, aromatic spice to the sugar filling inside the apples.

The step that matters

Cover and cook on very low heat.. Gentle heat under a lid lets the apples soften evenly through to the core while holding their shape. Higher heat would scorch the sugary bottoms and break the flesh apart before the centres are tender.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Quincefits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, wine, clove. 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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