Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Turnovers

A pastry filled with sliced apples, sugar, and lemon, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fruit Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Peel, core, and slice the apples.

  3. Roll out the puff pastry to about 1 inch thick and cut into circular pieces.

Fill and seal

  1. Place the sliced apples on one half of each pastry circle, sprinkle with sugar, and add lemon juice.

  2. Wet the edges of the pastry, fold it over, and press the edges to seal.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the tops with egg white and sprinkle with sifted sugar.

  2. Bake on a baking sheet for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

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).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Puff pastry
Its layers puff and turn flaky and crisp as the fat melts and steam lifts them in the oven.
Apples
They soften and release moisture, forming the soft, sweet filling inside the pastry.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the exposed sugar on top caramelise to a golden finish.
Egg white
Brushed on top, it promotes browning and gives the sprinkled sugar a glossy, crisp finish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and helps keep the apple slices from browning.

The step that matters

Sealing the edges. If the edges are not wetted and pressed firmly, steam from the juicy apples can force the pastry open during baking, letting the filling leak out and the turnover lose its shape.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, egg. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes