Name: For Apple Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pound apples; Juice of 1 lemon

Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

For Apple Sauce

Ingredients

1 pound apples
Juice of 1 lemon

Directions

Prepare

Peel and core the apples.
Chop the apples into small pieces.
Add the lemon juice to the chopped apples.

Cook and mash

Cook the mixture over medium heat until the apples are soft.
Mash the apples to your desired consistency.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,551 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Provide the bulk and pectin that thicken the sauce as they soften and break down.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the apples from browning.

“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.