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Dessert

Baked Apple-sauce

A baked sauce made from quartered apples, sugar, and water, cooked until dark red.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Apple-sauce

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.

Prepare

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

Bake

  1. Fill a deep pudding dish with the prepared apples.

  2. Add the sugar and water to the dish.

  3. Cover the dish tightly and bake for several hours until the apples are dark red.

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 + 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

Apples
Provide the bulk and flavor of the sauce as they break down into soft pulp.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples take on a deeper color during long baking.
Water
Creates steam in the covered dish, softening the apples evenly as they cook.

The step that matters

Cover the dish tightly. A tight cover traps moisture so the apples steam and soften rather than drying out. Over a long bake, a loose cover can leave the sauce dry and uneven.

“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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