Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Sauce

Apple sauce is a cooked mixture of tart and sweet apples, sugar, butter, and optional lemon or nutmeg, served warm or preserved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pare and core the tart apples, then stew them until tender.

  2. Sweeten to taste and add butter, along with lemon juice or nutmeg if desired.

  3. For the second method, pare and quarter sweet apples and let them dry for one day.

  4. Combine 1 quart of boiled down cider with 1.5 quarts of water in a pot.

  5. Stew the apples slowly for 2 to 3 hours in brass or tin.

  6. Preserve the sauce for six months if made rich.

  7. Add a few quinces to enhance the flavor.

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 + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + cidertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + quincetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cider + quincetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

Tart apples
Break down into the soft pulp that forms the body of the sauce.
Sweet apples
Add natural sweetness and pulp for the second method of the sauce.
Boiled down cider
Adds concentrated apple flavor and sweetness to the stewing liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer, smoother mouthfeel in the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the apples slowly for 2 to 3 hours in brass or tin.. Slow, gentle heat lets the apples soften evenly and reduce without scorching on the bottom of the pot. Fast boiling can burn the sugars and leave the sauce uneven.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, butter, cider, quince):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter, cider, quince. 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.

More apple sauce recipes

Cake 57Baked 20Brown 15Dried 8Cider 7Spiced 5 See all 252 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipes