Name: Apple Pie
Ingredients: 1 quart thinly sliced apples; ½ cup sugar; 2 tablespoons water; ¼ cup butter

Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Pie

Ingredients

1 quart thinly sliced apples
½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons water
¼ cup butter

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 the filling

Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).
Place the sliced apples in a pie dish.
Sprinkle the sugar and butter bits over the apples.
Add the water.

Assemble and bake

Roll out the upper and lower crusts.
Place the lower crust in the pie dish, fill with apples, and cover with the upper crust.
Bake for 30 minutes.

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 + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,706 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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: Form the bulk of the filling and soften as they bake, giving the pie its body.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and draws juice out of the apples to form a syrup.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, and melts into the filling to carry flavour.