Name: Fruit-tarts of Preserved Fruits
Ingredients: apples; fine beat sugar; lemon; cinnamon; candy orange-peel; white wine or cider; puff-paste

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit-tarts of Preserved Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Pare, core, and quarter the apples.
Stew and mash the apples, then sweeten with sugar.
Season with lemon juice, grated lemon zest, cinnamon, and orange-peel.
Cover a flat dish with puff-paste and create a rim around the edges.
Bake the crust until golden, then fill with jam just before serving.
Optionally, cut out shapes from leftover paste to decorate the top.

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.

Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,437 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, cinnamon, orange, white wine):

Vanillafits about as well
Limefits about as well
Figfits about as well
Applethe original

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