Name: Frosted Fruit
Ingredients: large ripe cherries; apricots; plums; grapes; egg whites; powdered sugar

Why it works: Apricot and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Frosted Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Cut off half the stem from the cherries.
In one dish, beat the egg whites until frothy.
In another dish, place the powdered sugar.
Take each piece of fruit, roll it first in the egg whites, then in the sugar.
Lay the coated fruit on a sheet of white paper.

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.

Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).
Apricot + grapetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together477 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Plum + grapetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together238 recipes

Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).
Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).