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Dessert

Strawberry Pie

A pie with a buttery crust filled with strawberries and topped with a sweetened egg white crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Strawberry 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.

Make the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, rub together the butter and lard into the flour with a pinch of salt.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and enough milk to form a dough.

  4. Roll out the dough and line a large pie tin.

Fill the pie

  1. Sprinkle the base with a little flour, then add the strawberries.

  2. Sprinkle the strawberries with 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 cup of sugar.

  3. Top with the beaten and sweetened egg whites.

  4. Lay strips of dough over the top in a crisscross pattern.

Bake

  1. Bake for 45 minutes.

  2. Tie a narrow strip of cloth around the edge of the pie tin to prevent juice from leaking out.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides structure for the dough and thickens the strawberry filling.
Butter and lard
Fat that shortens the dough, giving it a tender, flaky texture.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the dough; whites add structure to the topping.
Strawberries
Main filling, supplying flavor and juice that the flour must thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberry filling and balances their tartness.
Milk
Adds moisture so the flour and fat come together into a workable dough.

“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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