Name: Apple Soup
Ingredients: 5 pints mutton broth or beef stock; 1½ pounds cooking apples

Why it works: Mutton and apple work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 278 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Soup

Ingredients

5 pints mutton broth or beef stock
1½ pounds cooking apples

Directions

Clear the fat from the broth or stock and strain it through a fine sieve.
Bring the strained broth to a boil.
Add the cooking apples and stew them until soft.

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.

Mutton + appletop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together278 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking apples: Break down into soft pieces that thicken and sweeten the soup as they cook.
Mutton broth or beef stock: Forms the savoury liquid base of the soup.

“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.