Name: To Can Peaches
Ingredients: ½ pound sugar; 1 pound peaches; ½ pint water

Why it works: Sugar and peach are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and 2,308 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Can Peaches

Ingredients

½ pound sugar
1 pound peaches
½ pint water

Directions

Make the syrup

Make a syrup by combining ½ pound of sugar with ½ pint of water.

Cook and can

Pare the peaches and drop them into the syrup.
Boil the peaches in the syrup for 10 minutes.
Put the peaches into cans and seal them up.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the peaches and helps preserve their shape.
Peaches: The main fruit, which softens and absorbs the sweet syrup as it simmers.
Water: Dissolves the sugar to make the syrup that surrounds and flavours the peaches.

“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.