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Dessert

Sliced Apple Pie

A pie made with sliced apples stewed in water, sweetened with sugar, dusted with flour, butter, and nutmeg, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sliced Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Slice the apples and place them in a pot with just enough water to stew slightly.

  2. Cover tightly and cook for a few minutes until tender.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a rich pie crust and place the cooked apples into it without breaking them.

  2. Sprinkle the apples with sugar, a light dusting of flour, pieces of butter, and nutmeg.

  3. Cover with the top crust and bake until golden.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Apples
Provide the main filling that softens during stewing and bakes into the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown as it bakes.
Flour
Lightly dusted over the apples to help thicken the juices as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and promotes browning in the crust.
Rich pie crust
Forms the enclosing shell and top that holds the filling while it bakes.

The step that matters

Cook the apples until just tender. Apples stewed too long turn mushy and release excess liquid, which can make the pie watery and cause the filling to lose its shape when baked.

Swap the apple

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

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

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