Name: To Keep Cider Sweet
Ingredients: ½ cup white mustard; 1 pint clean wheat; brimstone (for smoking barrels); raisins (for bottling)

Why it works: Mustard and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 134 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

To Keep Cider Sweet

Ingredients

½ cup white mustard
1 pint clean wheat
brimstone (for smoking barrels)
raisins (for bottling)

Directions

Add ½ cup of white mustard or 1 pint of clean wheat to a barrel of cider to keep it sweet.
Smoke the barrels with brimstone before using, then rinse well.
When bottling cider, add a few raisins to make it brisk.

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.

Mustard + wheattop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together134 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Wheat + raisintop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together163 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together146 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).