Name: Apple Pie with Under Crust
Ingredients: pastry for pie crust; apples, sliced; sugar; nutmeg; cinnamon; lemon juice; butter

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Pie with Under Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Line a pie plate with pastry.
Prepare the apples by slicing them.
Fill the plate with apples, mounding them slightly in the center.
Sprinkle with sugar (1 to 1½ tablespoons per apple), nutmeg, cinnamon, or lemon juice.
Dot the filling with small pieces of butter.
Moisten the edge of the pastry with cold water.
Score the upper crust, place it over the filling, and press the edges down.
Bake in a hot oven at 450°F (230°C) for about 40 minutes, reducing the temperature slightly during the last 10 minutes.

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.

Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, butter):

Vanillafits better
Orangefits better
Raisinfits better
Applethe original

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