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Dessert

Peach Kuchen

A baked peach cake with biscuit crust, topped with sliced peaches, sugar, butter, and cinnamon, served warm with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Peach Kuchen

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, butter, sugar, baking powder, and salt to form a biscuit crust.

  3. Press the crust into the bottom of a deep pie tin, about ½ inch thick.

Assemble and bake

  1. Quarter the peaches and lay them on the crust.

  2. Sprinkle the peaches with ¼ cup sugar and dot with butter.

  3. Sprinkle cinnamon over the top.

  4. Bake without an upper crust for 30-35 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with 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.

  1. Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the biscuit crust that holds the peaches.
Butter
Adds fat to the crust, giving it tenderness and a rich flavor.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the crust rise and lighten.
Peaches
Provide moisture and fruity sweetness that soften and flavor the cake as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the crust and the peaches and helps the fruit's surface brown.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, cream. 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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