Why it works: Apple and raspberry work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 282 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Apples with Custard Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).
Pare and core the apples, keeping them whole.
Roll up an apple paring tightly and place it in the center of each apple.
Place the apples in a deep baking dish and barely cover the bottom with cold water.
Inverted a dish on top to keep in the steam and bake gently until tender, about 40 minutes.
Carefully lift the apples onto a hot dish, remove the apple parings, and fill the cavity with raspberry jam.
Pour custard sauce around the apples.
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.
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Apple + raspberrytop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together282 recipes
Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).
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Apple + milktop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together4,104 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
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Raspberry + milktop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,014 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together16,478 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together88,785 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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
Swap the raspberry
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, milk, egg, sugar):
- Vanillafits better
- Figfits better
- Pearfits better
- Raspberrythe original
Fit is the average pairing score against apple, milk, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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