Name: Apple Chutney
Ingredients: 1 red pepper, chopped; Juice of 4 lemons; 1 cup raisins, chopped; 1 tablespoon ground ginger; 1 pint cider vinegar; ¼ teaspoon cayenne; ½ cup currant jelly; 1 tablespoon salt

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Chutney

Ingredients

Directions

Combine all ingredients in a large pot.
Bring to a boil over medium heat.
Cook until the mixture thickens, stirring occasionally.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,154 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).
Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,800 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cider + curranttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lemon, ginger, cider, vinegar, currant):

Limefits better
Orangefits better
Plumfits better
Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, ginger, cider, vinegar, currant. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.