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Dessert

Black Caps

A baked apple stew flavored with wine, water, sugar, lemon, and cloves.

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 them in a shallow pan and sprinkle with white sugar.

  3. Bake the apples until tender.

Make the sauce

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

Stuff and stew

  1. Remove a slice from the stalk end of the apples and core them without peeling.

  2. Mix sugar with grated lemon and powdered cloves, then stuff the mixture into the apple cores.

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

  4. Cover and cook on low heat, basting occasionally with the liquid until done.

Finish

  1. Finish by browning 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

Large apples
Form the body of the dish, softening as they cook while holding their shape.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the tops brown when finished under high heat.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the cooking liquid and sauce.
Grated lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the apples.
Cloves
Adds warm, spicy aroma to the sugar filling inside the apples.

The step that matters

Cook covered on low heat, basting often. Gentle, moist heat softens the apple flesh evenly without breaking it down. High heat or a dry pan can split the apples or scorch the liquid before they 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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