Name: Brown Betty
Ingredients: 3 cups chopped apples; 2 cups bread crumbs; ½ cup sugar; ¼ teaspoon cinnamon; ¼ teaspoon nutmeg; 2 tablespoons butter; Juice and rind of ½ lemon; ¼ cup water

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Brown Betty

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare bread crumbs by grating stale bread or rubbing two pieces together.
In a bowl, mix the crumbs with melted butter and season with cinnamon and nutmeg.
In a buttered dish, layer the ingredients: place ¼ of the crumbs at the bottom, add half of the chopped apples, then ¼ more crumbs, the remaining apples, and top with the last ½ of the crumbs.
Drizzle lemon juice and rind over the top, and add water.

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.

Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, bread, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter):

Figfits better
Vanillafits better
Pearfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, bread, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.