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Dessert

Raisin Pie

A sweet pie filled with raisins, lemon, and sugar, baked in a pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix the sugar and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add the salt, lemon juice, grated lemon rind, and beaten egg to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the raisins and water.

  4. Cook in a double boiler until the mixture thickens.

  5. Cool the mixture, then pour it into a pastry-lined pie plate.

Bake

  1. Adjust the top crust over the filling.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 450°F (230°C) for 10 minutes.

  3. Reduce the temperature to 350°F (175°C) and bake for an additional 30 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Thickens the filling as it cooks, giving it a set, sliceable body.
Raisins
Provide the main fruit body and sweetness in the filling.
Egg
Adds richness and helps set the filling as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the lemon's acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet raisin filling.

The step that matters

Cook in a double boiler until the mixture thickens. Flour needs gentle, sustained heat to swell and gelatinize fully. Cooking too hot risks scorching or lumps, while cooking too briefly leaves the filling thin and runny after cooling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, flour, egg, sugar. 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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