Name: Stewed Apples
Ingredients: 1 pint water; ½ pint sugar; Peeled and quartered apples

Why it works: Sugar and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Stewed Apples

Ingredients

1 pint water
½ pint sugar
Peeled and quartered apples

Directions

In a clean, bright kettle, combine water and sugar to make a syrup.
Bring the syrup to a boil, then drop in the peeled and quartered apples.
Cover the kettle and stew slowly for 20 minutes, or until the apples are soft.

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.

Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 apples and helps them hold their shape.
Apples: Soften as they stew, becoming tender and taking on the flavour of the syrup.

“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.