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Apple Compote

A sweetened apple compote with currants, served with its own juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Apple Compote

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut the apples.

Cook

  1. Boil the apples with water, sugar, and dried currants until soft.

  2. Remove the apples and currants from the juice carefully.

  3. Boil the juice again with the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the juice over the compote, let it cool, and serve.

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 + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Good ripe sour apples
Provide the main body and tart flavour that the compote is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the tartness of the apples.
Dried currants
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness as they soften in the syrup.
Juice of 1 lemon
Adds extra acidity that brightens the flavour of the reduced juice.

The step that matters

Boil the apples until soft, then separate them from the juice. Cooking the apples only until tender keeps their shape, while overcooking turns them mushy. Lifting them out before reboiling the juice keeps the fruit from breaking down further and clouding the syrup.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, lemon. 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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