Name: Pickled Pears, and Sweet Apples
Ingredients: 6 pounds of fruit (pears or sweet apples); 3 cups of sugar; 5 dozen cloves; 1 pint of vinegar

Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pickled Pears, and Sweet Apples

Ingredients

6 pounds of fruit (pears or sweet apples)
3 cups of sugar
5 dozen cloves
1 pint of vinegar

Directions

Prepare

Stick 2 cloves into each apple or pear.

Make and cook

Heat the vinegar and sugar together to create a syrup.
Once the syrup is hot, add the fruit and cook until tender.

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.

Pear + clovetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together512 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Clove + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,386 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Pear + vinegartop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together380 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,079 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the pickling syrup and helps preserve the fruit's texture.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the fruit.
Cloves: Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the fruit.
Pears or sweet apples: Form the main body of the dish, softening as they cook in the syrup.