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Baked Peaches

Peaches baked with sugar, butter, lemon juice, nutmeg, served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Peaches

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, cut in halves, and remove stones from the peaches.

  2. Place the peaches in a shallow baking dish.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill each cavity with 1 teaspoon of sugar, ½ teaspoon of butter, a few drops of lemon juice, and a slight grating of nutmeg.

  2. Bake for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on circular pieces of buttered dry toast.

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.

  1. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Peach + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  4. Peach + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

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

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit that softens and becomes tender and juicy as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the peach juices caramelise slightly at the cut surface.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, helping the fruit brown lightly in the oven.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet peach flavour.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Peachthe original

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

“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.

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