Name: Apple Sauce
Ingredients: tart apples; water; sugar to taste

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 ↓

Apple Sauce

Ingredients

tart apples
water
sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Pare, quarter, and core the apples.
Soak the apples in cold water until all are prepared.

Cook and strain

Place the apples in a pot with a little water and cover tightly.
Boil quickly until the apples are soft.
Mash the apples with a potato masher.
Pass the mashed apples through a fine sieve.
Sweeten to taste after straining.

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

Tart apples: Provide the main body, pectin for thickening, and the tart flavour of the sauce.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the apples.

“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.