Name: Canning Fruits
Ingredients: 10 oz sugar; 1 quart fruit (e.g., quinces, raspberries, currants, crab-apples, pears, apples, strawberries, tomatoes, whortleberries, wild grapes, blueberries, gooseberries, peaches, plums)

Why it works: Apple and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Canning Fruits

Ingredients

10 oz sugar
1 quart fruit (e.g., quinces, raspberries, currants, crab-apples, pears, apples, strawberries, tomatoes, whortleberries, wild grapes, blueberries, gooseberries, peaches, plums)

Directions

Prepare jars by soaking them in a solution of soda or ammonia and water for 1 hour.
Rinse jars with warm water (not boiling) and dry them.
Air jars in the sun or wind before storing.
For canning, follow the boiling times and sugar quantities for each type of fruit as listed.
Ensure fruit is fresh and skins are unbroken.

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 + peartop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together649 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Quince + peartop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together133 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Quince + appletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together506 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Apple + grapetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,659 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Pear + grapetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together252 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, quince, crab, apple, pear, tomato, grape):

Plumfits better
Apricotfits better
Peachfits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, quince, crab, apple, pear, tomato, grape. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.