Name: Baked Apple Beverage
Ingredients: 5 or 6 good-sized, sharp, juicy apples; 2 quarts boiling water; sugar to taste

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Baked Apple Beverage

Ingredients

5 or 6 good-sized, sharp, juicy apples
2 quarts boiling water
sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Bake apples until soft.
Place baked apples in a jug.
Pour boiling water over the hot apples.

Steep and serve

Add sugar and gently stir.
Cover jug until it cools.
Strain mixture 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.

Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples: Provide the main flavour and body, with their juices and pectin giving the tea its character.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the tart apple flavour.

“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.