Name: Orange Tart
Ingredients: Juice of 1 sweet orange; 2 cups stewed apples (without water); 2 teaspoons sifted sugar; Puff pastry (enough to line a shallow dish)

Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Tart

Ingredients

Juice of 1 sweet orange
2 cups stewed apples (without water)
2 teaspoons sifted sugar
Puff pastry (enough to line a shallow dish)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Squeeze the juice of the orange over the stewed apples and add the sifted sugar, mixing gently.
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Line a shallow dish with puff pastry.

Assemble and bake

Spread the apple mixture over the pastry.
Cover with more puff pastry and seal the edges.
Bake until golden brown, then ice if serving cold.

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 + appletop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,212 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

Puff pastry: Forms the flaky, crisp base and top that enclose the filling and brown in the oven.
Stewed apples: Provide the bulk of the filling and moisture, softened by cooking so they spread easily.
Sifted sugar: Sweetens the filling and dissolves smoothly into the apple mixture when sifted.
Orange juice: Adds bright acidity and citrus aroma that balance the sweetness of the apples and sugar.