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Dessert

Iced Apples

Baked apples filled with sugar, butter, nutmeg, topped with icing and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Iced 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. Pare and core the apples.

  3. Fill each apple with sugar, a little butter, and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake the apples until nearly done.

  2. Let the apples cool, then transfer them to another plate carefully.

  3. If they break, pour off the juice.

  4. Cover the apples with icing and brown lightly.

  5. Serve with 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Hold their shape as the main body of the dish while softening in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling caramelize and brown slightly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the filling as it melts.
Icing
Forms a sweet coating that browns lightly under heat.
Cream
Adds smooth richness that balances the sweet, warm apples when served.

The step that matters

Transfer the apples after cooling. Baked apples are soft and can break when moved. Letting them cool slightly firms the flesh, and handling them carefully keeps them whole, so the juice stays with the fruit.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, nutmeg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, nutmeg, cream. 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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