Skip to main content
Main

Bacon and Apples

A dish of fried bacon and sweet apples, sprinkled 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 Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bacon

  1. Slice the bacon thin.

  2. Fry the sliced bacon until crisp.

  3. Transfer the bacon to a platter.

  4. Keep the bacon warm.

Fry the apples

  1. Fry thick slices of unpeeled sweet apples in the bacon fat until tender.

  2. Drain the apples.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the drained apples in the center of a hot platter.

  2. Arrange the fried bacon around the edge of the dish.

  3. Sprinkle sugar over the apples.

  4. Serve.

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

Bacon
Its fat is the frying medium, and its crisp pieces add salty, savory contrast to the sweet apples.
Sweet apples
Soften as they fry, turning firm slices tender while their natural sugars brown lightly at the surface.
Sugar
Sprinkled over the apples, it adds sweetness and helps the cut surfaces caramelize slightly.

The step that matters

Fry the apples in the bacon fat until tender. Thick apple slices need enough heat and time to cook through without burning on the outside. Frying in the hot fat browns the surface and softens the flesh, so the slices are tender but still hold their shape.

“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