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Dessert

Stewed Apples

Stewed apples are cooked with water, sugar, and nutmeg until tender, then served cold with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,790 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stewed Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the apples, cut into quarters, remove the core, blossom, and stem ends, and peel.

  2. Soak the apple pieces in cold water until all are prepared.

  3. Drain and place them in a broad granite saucepan in a single layer.

Stew

  1. Add 3 tablespoons of boiling water for each apple and sprinkle with 1½ tablespoons of sugar per apple.

  2. Cover the saucepan and cook slowly until tender but not broken, turning them over once.

Finish and serve

  1. Carefully remove the apples.

  2. If the syrup is thin, boil it uncovered for several minutes.

  3. Pour the syrup over the apples.

  4. Sprinkle grated nutmeg over the apples.

  5. Serve the apples cold.

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 + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Sweet apples
Provide the main body and flavour, softening into tender pieces as they stew.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and the syrup that forms around them.

The step that matters

Cook slowly under cover until tender but not broken. Gentle, covered heat softens the apple cells through without breaking them apart. Fast boiling would tear the pieces and turn the fruit mushy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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