Skip to main content
Dessert

Pickled Apples

Pickled apples are sweet apples boiled in a vinegar and brown sugar syrup with cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

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

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil vinegar and sugar together, skimming off any foam.

  2. Add the spices to the syrup.

Cook the apples

  1. Cook the halved sweet apples in the syrup until soft.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that gives pickled apples their tang and helps preserve them.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the syrup and balances the acidity of the vinegar.
Cloves
Adds warm, pungent aroma to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, warm aroma to the syrup.
Allspice
Adds a blended warm aroma that rounds out the spice flavor.
Sweet apples
Softens in the hot syrup and absorbs its sweet, spiced flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking the apples until soft. Apples keep cooking in the hot syrup, so they can turn mushy quickly. Checking them often helps them stay tender but hold their shape.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, allspice):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon, allspice. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes