Name: Apple-pie
Ingredients: apples; sugar; pounded cinnamon; pounded cloves; lemon zest; quince marmalade; candied citron or orange peel; puff pastry

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Apple-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Wipe, peel, core, and slice the apples.
Lay a strip of puff pastry around the edge of the pie dish.
Add a layer of sliced apples, then sprinkle with sugar and seasonings.
Repeat layering until the dish is heaped, keeping the fruit highest in the middle.
Cover with puff pastry and decorate the top with leaves or flowers.
If apples are dry, boil the parings and cores with a stick of cinnamon, strain, and add the liquid to the pie.

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.

Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together506 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together164 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,437 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, cinnamon, clove, quince, orange):

Pearfits better
Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cinnamon, clove, quince, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.