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Dessert

Washington Pie

A pie with a batter of sugar, butter, sweet milk, flour, egg, cream of tartar, baking soda, lemon flavoring, and layers of apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Washington Pie

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.

Prepare

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

  2. In a mixing bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

Mix and layer

  1. Add the sweet milk, flour, egg, cream of tartar, baking soda, and lemon flavoring, and mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the batter onto dinner plates, spreading apple sauce between each layer.

Bake

  1. Bake until golden brown.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps create a tender, fine crumb when creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and traps air with sugar for a light texture.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and moisture.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Produces carbon dioxide with the acid in the batter, leavening the cake and aiding browning.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating softened butter with sugar until light and fluffy traps air bubbles in the fat. These bubbles expand in the oven and give the cake lightness, so under-creaming leads to a dense result.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, egg, cream, lemon. 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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