Name: Peaches and Apricots
Ingredients: Peaches or apricots (quantity desired); Water (small quantity); Seeded raisins (optional)

Why it works: Peach and raisin work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peaches and Apricots

Ingredients

Peaches or apricots (quantity desired)
Water (small quantity)
Seeded raisins (optional)

Directions

Soak the fruit

Place the desired quantity of peaches or apricots in a deep vessel.
Add a light weight on top and pour in just enough water to not quite cover the fruit.
Let the fruit stand for six to eight hours.
Remove the fruit to another vessel.

Make the pulp and serve

Take a few pieces of the same fruit and peel them.
Reduce to a pulp.
Add the pulp to the water in which the fruit was soaked.
Pour this mixture over the soaked fruit.
Serve.

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.

Peach + raisintop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41 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

Peaches or apricots: Form the main body of the preserve and supply the fruit flavour and texture.
Seeded raisins: Add extra sweetness and a chewy texture to the preserve.

“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.