Name: Baked Peaches
Ingredients: peaches; sugar; butter; cinnamon; lemon juice; egg whites

Why it works: Peach and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Baked Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the stones from the peaches and fill the space with a mixture of sugar, butter, and cinnamon.
Bake the peaches slowly, basting with a syrup made of lemon juice and sugar.
When the peaches are tender, cover them with meringue.
Brown the meringue and serve the peaches hot or 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together625 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together947 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Peach + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together860 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, cinnamon, lemon, egg):

Vanillafits better
Orangefits better
Raisinfits better
Peachthe original

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