Name: Baked Apples
Ingredients: 7 to 8 tart apples; 3 cups sugar; 1½ cups water

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Baked Apples

Ingredients

7 to 8 tart apples
3 cups sugar
1½ cups water

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

Cut apples in half and remove the cores.
Place the apples in a baking pan with the cored side up.

Make the syrup

Combine sugar and water in a pot and cover the pot.
Bring the mixture to a boil for 30 minutes.
Remove the cover and pour the syrup over the apples.

Bake and serve

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until browned to your liking.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tart apples: Their firm flesh holds its shape while the syrup softens and sweetens it.
Sugar: Dissolves into the syrup that sweetens the apples and helps them brown in the oven.

“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.