Skip to main content
Main

Baked Apples

A simple oven-baked apple dish with sugar, lemon juice, and optional cinnamon, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Baked Apples

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Wipe, core, and score the apples.

  3. Place the apples in an agate baking dish.

Bake

  1. Fill each apple's center with sugar and lemon juice or sugar and cinnamon.

  2. Pour the water around the apples, not over them.

  3. Bake until the apples are soft, about 20 to 45 minutes, basting every ten minutes.

  4. Transfer the apples to a dish and pour the juice over them.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with plain or whipped cream.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 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

Sour apples
Provide the main body and tart flavor that balances the sugar as they soften.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps the filling caramelize slightly as it cooks down.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the apple flesh from tasting flat.

The step that matters

Basting every ten minutes. Apples bake in a moist, hot environment, and regular basting with the pan liquid keeps the flesh from drying at the surface while it softens evenly. Checking for doneness matters because the stated time range is wide, and overbaking can collapse the fruit.

“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.

More baked apples recipes

with Wine 10with Cream 7with Butter 5with Meringue 5with Rice 5with Syrup 5 See all 248 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes