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Dessert

Pommes Au Beurrk

A French dessert of stewed apples cooked in butter, sugar, and cinnamon, served with apricot jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Pommes Au Beurrk

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare and core the apples without piercing them.

  2. Fill the cavities with fresh butter and place them in a single layer in a stewpan.

Stew

  1. Add ¼ lb of butter cut into small pieces to the pan and stew the apples gently, turning occasionally until tender.

  2. Sprinkle the apples with sifted sugar and pounded cinnamon, then stew for a few more minutes.

Serve

  1. Arrange the apples in a hot dish, filling each with warm apricot jam and adding a small amount on top.

  2. Pour the syrup from the pan around the apples and serve immediately.

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 + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Cinnamon + apricottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 softening, becoming tender and sweet under gentle stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, enriching the syrup and softening the apple flesh as it melts.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps form a syrup in the pan with the melted butter.
Apricot jam
Adds concentrated fruit sweetness and glossy finish to the filled cavities.

The step that matters

Stew gently and turn the apples. Gentle heat cooks the apples through without bursting the skins or breaking the flesh, and turning them lets heat reach all sides evenly so they become tender throughout.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, sugar, cinnamon. 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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