Name: English Apple Pie
Ingredients: Pastry crust for a deep dish; Apples (quartered and cored); Sugar; Lemon peel (grated); Cloves; Lemon juice; Water; Blade of mace; Quince or marmalade

Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

English Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Line the sides of a deep dish with pastry crust.
Quarter the apples and remove the cores.
Layer half of the apples in the dish, sprinkle with half the sugar, grated lemon peel, and a few cloves.
Add the remaining apples and sugar, then drizzle with lemon juice.
Boil the cores and peelings in water with a blade of mace until soft, then strain through a colander.
Boil the strained liquid with sugar and pour it into the pie along with a little quince or marmalade.
Cover with the upper crust and bake.

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 + quincetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together506 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together164 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,774 recipes

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

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,150 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, lemon, clove, quince):

Cinnamonfits better
Gingerfits better
Allspicefits better
Macethe original

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