Name: Apple Pie, with Custard
Ingredients: a few cloves; a little cinnamon; ½ cup water; apples (peeled and cored); grated lemon (from 1 lemon); sugar (to taste); pie crust (for top and bottom); custard (for filling); whipped cream (optional, instead of custard)

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Apple Pie, with Custard

Ingredients

Directions

In a small saucepan, combine cloves, cinnamon, and water. Simmer for a few minutes, then strain and cool.
Peel and quarter the apples, removing the cores. Place them in a pie dish.
Add grated lemon and sugar to the apples, then pour the cooled spiced water over them.
Roll out the pie crust and place it around the rim of the dish. Cover the apples with the top crust.
Bake the pie until golden brown, then let it cool.
Once cool, remove the top crust and pour custard over the apples. Optionally, cut the top crust into pieces and arrange around the apples.

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.

Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,774 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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 (clove, cinnamon, apple, sugar, cream):

Vanillafits better
Quincefits better
Pearfits better
Lemonthe original

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