Name: Canned Peaches
Ingredients: 1 lb peaches; ½ lb sugar; ½ cup water

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Canned Peaches

Ingredients

1 lb peaches
½ lb sugar
½ cup water

Directions

Prepare the peaches

Slice the peaches and layer them in a pan with sugar.
For every 6 lbs of peaches, add ½ cup of water.
Let the mixture sit at the back of the stove until liquid forms.

Jar and store

Fill jars with the mixture, placing them in a large pan of hot water.
Store the jars in a dark closet.
Use ripe but firm peaches.

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.

Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,308 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

Peaches: Provide the main fruit, flavor, and texture of the finished preserve.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and draws liquid out of the peaches to form syrup.

“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.