Name: Baked Apples, with Cream
Ingredients: sour apples; cream

Why it works: Apple and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,089 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Baked Apples, with Cream

Ingredients

sour apples
cream

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

Prepare the sour apples by peeling and coring them.
Place the apples in a baking dish.
Add a little water to the dish to prevent burning.

Bake and serve

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until tender.
Serve warm 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.

Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,089 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sour apples: Provide the main body and tart flavour that the baked fruit is built around.
Cream: Adds richness and a smooth, cooling contrast to the warm, soft apples.

“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.