Name: Pork with Apple-Sauce
Ingredients: 1 whole pork roast; 2 teaspoons made mustard; 1 glass vinegar; 1 apple; 1 cup bread crumbs; 1 tablespoon chopped sage; salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste; juice of 1 lemon

Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pork with Apple-Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Score the skin of the pork roast.
Mix the bread crumbs, chopped apple, and boiled sage and onions for stuffing.
Stuff the pork roast with the mixture.
Roast the pork until well done.
Serve with a glass of vinegar mixed with mustard and apple-sauce on the side.

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.

Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together887 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mustard + sagetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 (pork, mustard, vinegar, bread, sage, pepper, lemon):

Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Orangefits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, mustard, vinegar, bread, sage, pepper, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.