Why it works: Apple and honey work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 569 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Cider
Ingredients
Directions
Press the juice
Harvest ripe apples that can be easily shaken from the tree.
Bruise or grind the apples into a mash.
Place the mash in a fine cloth.
Squeeze out the juice from the cloth.
Strain the juice through a fine sieve into a clean cask.
Mash the leftover pulp with a little warm water.
Add a quarter of the warmed pulp back to the cider.
Ferment
Mix honey, egg whites, and flour together.
Place the mixture in a cloth and hang it in the cider cask.
Add 1 pint of warm ale yeast to the cider.
Let the mixture ferment for 5 to 6 days.
Bottle and store
Transfer the fermented cider to smaller casks or bottles.
Leave an inch of space at the top of each bottle to prevent bursting.
Check for fermentation by listening for hissing air through the corks.
Store bottles and casks warm in winter and cool in summer.
Add a small lump of loaf sugar to each bottle to preserve strength.
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.
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Apple + honeytop 8% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together569 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together16,478 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Red-streaked pippins apples
- Provide the juice that becomes the cider and the sugars yeast ferments.
- Honey
- Supplies extra sugar to feed the yeast during fermentation.
- Egg whites
- Help clarify the cider by collecting suspended particles as they settle.
- Flour
- Works with the egg whites in the hung cloth to help clear the cider.
- Ale yeast
- Converts the apple and honey sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Leaving space at the top of each bottle. Fermentation keeps releasing carbon dioxide after bottling. Without headspace, pressure builds and bottles can burst, so the space must be left before corking.
Swap the apple
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (honey, egg, flour, sugar):
- Vanillafits better
- Raisinfits better
- Figfits better
- Applethe original
Fit is the average pairing score against honey, egg, flour, sugar. 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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