Skip to main content
Main

Bacon and Fried Apples

A dish of sliced bacon and apples fried together, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Bacon and Fried Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the bacon

  1. Fry the bacon in a hot frying pan until crispy.

  2. Transfer the bacon to a hot platter.

Fry the apples

  1. Sprinkle a little sugar over the apple slices.

  2. In the bacon fat, fry the apple slices until tender and light brown on both sides, being careful not to burn the fat.

Serve

  1. Arrange the apples around the bacon.

  2. 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 + 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

Fat bacon
Renders fat for frying the apples and supplies savory, salty flavor.
Sour apples
Hold their shape when fried and add tart acidity that balances the sugar and bacon.
Sugar
Caramelizes on the apple surface, adding sweetness and light browning.

The step that matters

Frying the apples in the bacon fat. The fat must be hot enough to brown the apple surfaces but not so hot that it scorches. Scorched fat turns bitter and dark, spoiling the flavor, while sugar on the apples burns quickly at high heat. Gentle, steady heat lets the apples soften inside while browning evenly on both sides.

“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.

You might also like

Apple SoupApple Soup33 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes