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Dessert

Apple Preserves

A sweet preserve made from apples, sugar, and ginger tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and tea work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 216 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apple Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the apples, removing the cores.

  2. For each pound of apples, use ½ pound of sugar.

Make the syrup

  1. Make ginger tea and strain it over the sugar.

  2. Cook the mixture until it forms a thick syrup.

Cook and seal

  1. Add the apples and cook until they are done without stirring.

  2. Seal immediately in glass jars.

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. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Apple + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Apple + teatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together150 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Provide the fruit body of the preserve, which becomes tender as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup, which helps preserve the fruit.
Ginger tea
Adds a warm gingery aroma and flavour to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the apples without stirring. Stirring breaks the apple pieces apart and turns the preserve mushy. Letting the fruit cook undisturbed in the thick sugar syrup keeps the pieces whole and tender.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger, tea):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, tea. 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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