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Dessert

Apple Paste

Apple paste is a preserve made from ripe apples and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Apple Paste

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and core the apples.

  2. Cook the apples in a little water until quite soft.

  3. Rub the cooked apples through a fine sieve using a wooden spoon.

Make the paste

  1. Weigh the pulp and place it in a preserving pan with an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

  3. Spread the paste thinly on plates or in molds.

Dry

  1. Dry in a cool oven or on a cool stove.

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

Sound ripe apples
Provide the pulp that cooks down into the thick, set paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates during boiling, helps the paste set firm and keep.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 20 minutes. Boiling the pulp with sugar drives off water and concentrates the sugar, which thickens the paste enough to set when cooled and dried. Too little boiling leaves it soft and sticky.

“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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