Name: Iced Apples
Ingredients: 6 apples; 1 cup sugar; 2 cups water; sugar for sprinkling; meringue; cream for serving

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Iced Apples

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Poach the apples

Core the apples.
Cook the apples in a syrup made of sugar and water.
Drop the apples into the boiling syrup until tender.
Lift the apples out onto a platter.
Let them cool.

Top with meringue

Cover the cooled apples with a thin layer of meringue.
Sift a little sugar over the meringue.
Brown slightly in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

Make the syrup jelly

Boil the syrup until it reduces to ½ cup.
Pour the syrup out.
Let it cool to form a jelly.
Cut the jelly into squares.

Assemble and serve

Place the squares over and around the apples.
Serve cold with sugar and cream.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,089 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Apple and sugar 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

Apples: Hold their shape when poached and become tender, forming the base of the dish.
Sugar: Sweetens the poaching syrup and, concentrated by boiling, sets into the jelly as it cools.
Meringue: Whipped egg white topping that adds airy sweetness and browns lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Reducing the syrup to ½ cup. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar, which is what lets the syrup set as a jelly when cooled. Too little reduction leaves a runny syrup that will not set, and too much can harden into candy-like sugar.