Skip to main content
Dessert

Eaisin Pie

A raisin pie with lemon juice, sugar, and flour filling baked in pie crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Eaisin Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the raisins in a little water until soft.

  2. In a bowl, mix the lemon juice, sugar, and flour together.

  3. Combine the mixture with the softened raisins.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill two small pie crusts with the filling.

  2. Bake until the crusts are 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. 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide the bulk of the filling and sweetness as they soften and release their sugars.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the filling as it cooks with the juices.
Flour
Thickens the raisin juices so the filling sets rather than running out of the pie.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the raisins and sugar.
Pie crusts
Form the shell that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Combining the flour with the juice and sugar before adding the raisins. Flour needs to be evenly distributed to thicken the liquid properly; clumps can leave dry pockets or uneven setting in the baked filling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More raisin pie recipes

Lemon 28Apple 17Cranberry 7Molasses 6Sour Cream 4 See all 104 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes