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Dessert

Mock Cherry Pie

A fruit pie made with cranberries, raisins, sugar, flour, and vanilla, baked in a double 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 ↓

Mock Cherry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Wash cranberries in a bowl of cold water to remove seeds.

  2. In a bowl, mix flour and sugar.

  3. Remove cranberries from water and add to the mixture.

  4. Stir in hot water, salt, and vanilla.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour filling into one pie crust and cover with the second crust.

  2. 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together782 recipes

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

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavor and the bulk of the filling.
Seeded raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture to the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the cranberries.
Flour
Thickens the juices into a set filling as the pie bakes.
Pie crusts
Enclose the filling and form the pie's structure.

The step that matters

Bake until the filling bubbles. Flour only thickens the juices once the filling gets hot enough to bubble. Judging by golden color alone can leave the filling runny, so look for bubbling in the center as well as browning on top.

“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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