Name: A New Drink
Ingredients: ½ gallon water; 4 ripe pippin apples; honey to taste

Why it works: Apple and honey work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 569 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

A New Drink

Ingredients

½ gallon water
4 ripe pippin apples
honey to taste

Directions

Boil the water in a pot.
Cut each apple into 8 slices without peeling.
Add the apple slices to the boiling water and cook until soft.
Strain the mixture through a sieve, pressing the apples gently against the sieve.
Add honey to sweeten and serve lukewarm.

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 + honeytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together569 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pippin apples: Provide the main flavor and natural sweetness, with pectin that gives the drink body.
Honey: Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the apples.

“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.