Name: A Nice Dessert Dish
Ingredients: 4 cups thinly sliced apples; 1 cup sugar; ½ cup water

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

A Nice Dessert Dish

Ingredients

4 cups thinly sliced apples
1 cup sugar
½ cup water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

In a quart bowl, layer the sliced apples and sugar alternately.
Add the water and cover with a saucer, securing it with a weight.

Bake and serve

Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for three hours.
Let it cool, then turn out the dessert to 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.

Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Provide the bulk of the dessert and, as they soften, its tender, moist body.
Sugar: Sweetens the apples and draws out juices that help them soften during the long bake.
Water: Adds moisture so the apples steam and stay tender in the covered bowl.

“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.