Name: Peach Sauce
Ingredients: 1 quart dried peaches; white sugar to taste

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Sauce

Ingredients

1 quart dried peaches
white sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Soak the dried peaches in cold water.

Cook and sweeten

Cover and cook until tender.
Drain and mash the peaches to a smooth pulp.
Add white sugar to sweeten and cook the mixture well.

Cool and serve

Set aside to cool before serving.

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.

Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Dried peaches: Provide the main fruit body and flavor once softened and mashed into the sauce.
White sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the tart, concentrated flavor of the dried fruit.

“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.