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Dessert

Combination Pie

A fruit pie topped with a sponge batter made from eggs, flour, sugar, water, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Combination Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Make a bottom crust and fill it with ripe grapes or cranberries.

  2. Sweeten the fruit well and sprinkle a little flour on top.

  3. Bake the pie crust until done.

Make the sponge topping and finish

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs, sugar, flour, and water to make a sponge batter.

  2. Add baking powder to the batter and pour it over the baked pie.

  3. Return the pie to the oven and brown slightly.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Grape + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,482 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Provide structure and lift to the sponge batter as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the sponge topping rises and turns light.
Flour
Gives the sponge batter and the fruit layer body so they hold their shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and the batter and helps the topping brown.
Grapes or cranberries
Supply the main fruit flavour and juice for the filling.

The step that matters

Adding baking powder to the batter. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it gets wet and heated, so the batter should be poured over the pie and baked without delay to keep the sponge light.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Grapethe original

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