Name: Making Syrup
Ingredients: ¼ pound sugar; 1 pint water; fruits (apples, peaches, pears, quinces, or plums)

Why it works: Sugar and apple 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 ↓

Making Syrup

Ingredients

¼ pound sugar
1 pint water
fruits (apples, peaches, pears, quinces, or plums)

Directions

Boil ¼ pound of sugar with 1 pint of water for 10 minutes.
Use this syrup for apples, peaches, pears, quinces, or plums.

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.

Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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: Dissolves into the water to form a sweet syrup that coats and flavors the fruit.
Water: Dissolves the sugar so the syrup can be boiled into a pourable liquid.

“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.