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Dessert

Damson or Plum Pie

A fruit pie made with damsons stewed, sweetened, and baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Damson or Plum 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 the filling

  1. Stew the damsons in just enough water to prevent burning until tender.

  2. While hot, sweeten the damsons with sugar and let them cool.

Assemble the pie

  1. Pour the cooled damsons into pie dishes lined with pie crust.

  2. Dredge flour over the damsons.

  3. Cover with more pie crust, wet and pinch the edges together.

  4. Cut a slit in the center of the cover for steam to escape.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Damsons
Provide the tart fruit flavor and natural pectin that thickens the filling as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the fruit's tartness.
Flour
Thickens the released fruit juices so the filling holds its shape when sliced.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the damsons cool before filling the pie. Hot fruit softens the raw bottom crust and can make it soggy, and it releases steam faster, so cooling the filling first helps the crust bake crisp.

“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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