Name: Apple Jelly
Ingredients: 8 quarts apples, quartered; 4 quarts cold water; juice of 1 lemon (optional, for spring)

Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Jelly

Ingredients

8 quarts apples, quartered
4 quarts cold water
juice of 1 lemon (optional, for spring)

Directions

Prepare

Wash, stem, and wipe the apples, cleaning the blossom end thoroughly.
Cut the apples into quarters and place them in a preserving kettle.
Barely cover the apples with cold water.

Cook and strain

Cook gently until the apples are soft and clear.
Strain the juice and proceed as you would for currant jelly.
You should have about 3 quarts of juice from the apples and 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.

Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,551 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Provide the pectin and natural acidity that help the juice set into jelly.
Cold water: Extracts flavor and juice from the apples as they cook gently.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.