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Dessert

Buttered Apples. Excellent.

A dish of stewed apples flavored with 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 ↓

Buttered Apples. Excellent.

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. Stew the apples gently, turning them occasionally until they are almost tender.

  2. Add sifted sugar and pounded cinnamon, shaking well to combine.

  3. Stew for a few more minutes until tender.

Serve

  1. Arrange the apples in a hot dish, filling each with warm apricot jam.

  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 stewing and provide the main body of the dessert.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and moisture, enriching the apples as they cook in their cavities.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps form a syrup with the cooking juices.
Pounded cinnamon
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the apples and syrup.
Apricot jam
Adds extra sweetness and fruity flavour inside each apple.

The step that matters

Stew gently until almost tender. High heat can split the skins and break the apples down into mush before they are cooked through. Gentle heat with occasional turning cooks them evenly while keeping their shape.

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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