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Dessert

Apple Cheese

Apple Cheese is a sweet apple dessert made by boiling apples with sugar, water, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water in a large pot.

  2. Add the quartered apples and grated lemon rind.

Cook

  1. Boil for 3 hours, stirring continuously.

  2. Ten minutes before the end, add the lemon juice and continue to stir while boiling quickly.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and apple 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates during boiling, helps give the mixture its thick, spreadable body.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the mixture and natural pectin, which helps it thicken and set as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports the pectin in setting.
Lemon rind
Adds fragrant citrus aroma from its oils.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mixture boils. As water evaporates over the long boil, sugar and fruit concentrate and can scorch on the base of the pot. Continuous stirring spreads the heat evenly and prevents burning, which would give a bitter flavour.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple. 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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