Name: Sweet Pickles
Ingredients: 3 pounds sugar; ½ pint vinegar; spices to taste; 7 pounds fruit

Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles

Ingredients

3 pounds sugar
½ pint vinegar
spices to taste
7 pounds fruit

Directions

Boil the sugar and vinegar together to create a syrup.
Pour the hot syrup over the fruit.
Seal in jars or airtight containers.

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.

Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the pickle and, with the vinegar, forms the syrup that preserves the fruit.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps keep it stable.
Fruit: Forms the bulk of the pickle and soaks up the sweet, sour syrup as it sits.

“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.