Name: To Keep Cider Sweet
Ingredients: 1 barrel of cider; ½ pound white mustard seed; ½ ounce oil of sassafras; 2½ pounds rock candy; ½ pound rare beefsteak

Why it works: Cider and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

To Keep Cider Sweet

Ingredients

Directions

Add ½ pound of white mustard seed and ½ ounce of oil of sassafras to 1 barrel of cider.
When the cider reaches the desired point, add 2½ pounds of rock candy and ½ pound of rare beefsteak. Stir well to combine.

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.

Cider + mustardtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,414 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cider: Forms the base liquid that the other ingredients flavour and sweeten.
White mustard seed: Adds a sharp, pungent aroma and bite to the cider.
Oil of sassafras: Contributes a distinctive aromatic, root-beer-like flavour.
Rock candy: Provides sweetness to balance the sharpness of the cider.
Rare beefsteak: Added raw at the end, it is included as a listed ingredient of the recipe.

“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.