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Dessert

Delicious Apple Pie

A pie with tart apples, sugar, water, butter, almond extract, puff pastry crust, meringue topping, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,245 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Delicious Apple Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple filling

  1. Pare and core the apples.

  2. Boil sugar in water for 5 minutes.

  3. Add butter and almond extract.

  4. Stir in the apples.

  5. Cover and bake until tender.

  6. Cool.

Bake the crust

  1. Line a deep pie tin with puff paste and prick with a fork.

  2. Bake the crust until golden.

Assemble and finish

  1. Fill the crust with the apple mixture.

  2. Make a meringue with egg whites and almonds.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pie.

  4. Dust with sugar.

  5. Brown slightly in a cool oven.

  6. Serve very cold.

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.

  1. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + almondtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tart apples
Provide the main body and fruit flavour of the filling, softening as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and filling and helps the meringue brown lightly on top.
Egg whites
Whipped into the meringue to form a light topping that sets when browned.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the apple mixture for a softer, rounder flavour.
Almond extract
Adds a strong almond aroma that complements the apples.

The step that matters

Brown slightly in a cool oven. The meringue sets and colours slowly at low heat. Too hot an oven scorches its surface before the inside dries, and the topping can weep or toughen.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, almond, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, almond, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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