Name: Apple or Carolina Snowballs
Ingredients: large Pippin apples; orange peel, finely chopped; lemon peel, finely chopped; ⅓ cup rice; butter; wine; loaf sugar

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Apple or Carolina Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Core the large Pippin apples.
Fill the centers with finely chopped orange and lemon peel.
Place ⅓ cup of rice in a cloth, covering the apple with the rice.
Tie the cloth securely and boil for 1 hour.
Make a sauce by melting butter, adding wine, and mixing in loaf sugar.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Apple + winetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,207 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,366 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Orange + ricetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,067 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, lemon, rice, butter, wine, sugar):

Vanillafits about as well
Blackberryfits about as well
Mangofits about as well
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, rice, butter, wine, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.