Name: Apple Tart
Ingredients: apples; sugar; puff pastry; cream or thin custard; whole ginger (optional); cloves (optional); orange rind (optional)

Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Tart

Ingredients

Directions

Peel as many apples as you want, placing them in cold water to preserve their color.
Cut each apple into eight pieces and remove the cores.
Fill your dish with the apple pieces, sweetening them as you go.
Cover the dish with puff pastry and sift a little sugar on top before baking.
Serve with cream or a thin custard.

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.

Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,833 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Clove + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,987 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,774 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, cream, clove, orange):

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegfits about as well
Cardamomfits about as well
Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cream, clove, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.