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Dessert

Apple Hedgehog

A layered apple dessert with whole and sliced apples, almond strips, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Apple Hedgehog

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel the apples, core eight of them carefully, and slice the remaining four.

  2. Place the eight whole apples in a saucepan with the moist sugar and water. Stew gently until tender, then transfer them to a dish.

Make the pulp

  1. Cook the sliced apples in the syrup until perfectly soft, then beat them into a pulp.

Shape and serve

  1. Spread a layer of apple pulp on a dish, place the whole apples on top, fill the spaces with more apple pulp, and cover with the remaining pulp, forming a dome.

  2. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, sweeten with castor sugar to taste, and spread lightly over the apples.

  3. Insert the strips of almonds to represent the back of a hedgehog, and serve.

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. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Apple + almondtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. 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

Sour cooking apples
Provide the bulk of the dessert and, once cooked, a soft pulp that holds the shape.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps form a syrup as they stew.
Egg whites
Whisked to stiffness, they form a light meringue topping over the apples.
Blanched baked almonds
Add crunch and a nutty flavour as the hedgehog's spines.

The step that matters

Beating the sliced apples into a pulp. The sliced apples must be cooked until perfectly soft before beating, otherwise the pulp will be lumpy and will not hold the dome shape when the whole apples are set in it.

Swap the apple

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

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

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