Name: Fruit Pie
Ingredients: juicy fruit; sugar; stale bread; butter

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Pie

Ingredients

juicy fruit
sugar
stale bread
butter

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Fill a pudding dish with juicy fruit.
Place an old cup upside down in the center and pack fruit around it.

Top and bake

Cover with a top crust or use stale bread sprinkled with sugar and dots of butter.
Sprinkle a scant 2 teaspoons of sugar over the crust.
Bake at 300°F (150°C) to develop the fruit's natural sugars.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Juicy fruit: Provides the filling, moisture and most of the flavor of the pie.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps browning on the crust.
Stale bread: Soaks up fruit juices and forms a soft, absorbent topping.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the bread topping.

“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.