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Dessert

Irish Apple Pie

A pastry-covered apple pie baked with brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, lemon peel, quince marmalade, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Irish Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Pare and core the apples, cutting them into four or eight pieces.

  3. Arrange the apple pieces in a baking dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Sprinkle with brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, lemon peel, and quince marmalade.

  2. Add a little water to the dish.

  3. Cover the apples with puff pastry.

  4. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Cinnamon + quincetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the main body and tart flavour of the filling as they soften in the oven.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a syrup with the apple juices.
Quince marmalade
Adds concentrated fruit flavour and natural pectin to thicken the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that covers and bakes over the apples.

The step that matters

Covering the apples with puff pastry. The pastry must seal the dish well so steam stays inside and softens the apples, and it should be cut or vented so steam can escape without making the crust soggy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, clove, cinnamon, quince):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, clove, cinnamon, quince. 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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