Skip to main content
Dessert

Apples - Baked and Stewed

Apples baked or stewed with optional cinnamon, orange peel, or lemon peel, served with a sugar syrup.

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

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Apples - Baked and Stewed

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.

Bake the apples

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Wash the apples and remove any defective parts and the blossom end.

  3. Place the apples in a baking pan and bake for 30 minutes or until tender.

  4. Check doneness with a broom straw; if soft, remove from the oven.

Make the syrup and serve

  1. In the same pan, combine ½ cup sugar and 1 pint water, and boil for a few minutes to make syrup.

  2. Pour the syrup over the baked apples and serve.

Stew the apples

  1. To stew apples, peel and quarter them, removing the cores.

  2. In a clean kettle, combine 1 pint water and ½ pint sugar, and boil with cinnamon, orange peel, or lemon peel for flavor.

  3. Add the apples, cover, and stew gently for 20 minutes until soft, shaking the kettle occasionally to prevent sticking.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  5. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 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
Form the main body of the dish, softening into tender fruit when baked or stewed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that flavours the apples.

The step that matters

Checking doneness of the baked apples. Apples baked too briefly stay firm in the centre, while overbaking collapses them. A broom straw slid into the flesh shows whether the fruit is soft enough without guesswork.

“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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes