Name: Compote of Apricots
Ingredients: 1 cup water; ¼ pound (1 cup) sugar; Apricot kernels

Why it works: Sugar and apricot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Compote of Apricots

Ingredients

1 cup water
¼ pound (1 cup) sugar
Apricot kernels

Directions

In a saucepan, combine water and sugar to make a syrup.
Remove the kernels from the apricots and add them to the syrup.
Stew the kernels in the syrup until tender.

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 + apricottop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the kernels' flavour as they stew.
Water: Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup in which the kernels stew.
Apricot kernels: Provide a distinctive almond-like flavour to the syrup as they simmer.

“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.