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Apples with Custard Sauce

Baked apples served with custard sauce and raspberry jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and raspberry work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 282 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apples with Custard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Pare and core the apples, keeping them whole.

  3. Roll up the apple peel tightly and place it in the center of each apple.

  4. Place the apples in a deep baking dish and barely cover the bottom with cold water.

Bake

  1. Invert a dish on top to keep in the steam and bake gently until tender, about 40 minutes.

Serve

  1. Carefully lift the apples onto a hot dish, remove the apple peels, and fill the cavity with raspberry jam.

  2. Pour the custard sauce around the apples.

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 + raspberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together282 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Raspberry + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Apples
Hold their shape while the flesh softens into a tender, moist filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard sauce as they set gently with heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard sauce, adding richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tart apples and the custard.
Raspberry jam
Adds sweetness and fruit flavour to the cavity of each apple.

The step that matters

Bake gently under the inverted dish. Low oven heat and the trapped steam from the little water cook the apples evenly and keep them moist. Higher heat or drying out can split the skins and leave the flesh tough or ragged.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, milk, egg, sugar. 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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