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Dessert

Apple Gateau

Layered apple dessert made with apples, water, gelatine, and flavored with sherry, ginger brandy, lemon rind, and colored with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Apple Gateau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Weigh the apples after peeling and coring them.

  2. Quarter the apples and cook them in the water flavored by boiling the cores and lemon peel.

Make the layers

  1. Once reduced to a pulp, add sugar and other ingredients, then pass through a fine sieve.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in a little hot water and add it to the sieved mixture.

  3. Divide the mixture into three parts: color one green with greengage jam, one yellow with apricot jam, and the last pink with carmine and vanilla.

  4. Mould in three layers, with the pink layer in the middle.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with cream or custard.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Apple + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together395 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Apple + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Apple + brandytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the main body and pulp that forms the gateau's base.
Gelatine
Sets the sieved apple mixture so it holds its shape when turned out.
Sherry
Adds aroma and a warm, sweet-wine flavor to the apple layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple pulp to taste.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine in a little hot water before adding it. Gelatine must be fully dissolved to set evenly; lumps or undissolved granules leave weak or grainy patches in the layers.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sherry, ginger, brandy, sugar):

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sherry, ginger, brandy, sugar. 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.

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