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Peach Meringue Pie

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Peach and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 558 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Meringue Pie

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and pit the peaches, then stew them until tender with some peach kernels.

  2. Pass the stewed peaches through a colander.

  3. Fill a pie crust with the peach mixture and bake until done.

  4. Prepare a thick meringue by beating egg whites with sugar and flavoring with vanilla.

  5. Spread the meringue over the pie and brown it in the oven.

  6. Serve the pie cold.

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. Peach + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together558 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Vanilla + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Swap the peach

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Blueberryfits about as well
  3. Peachthe original
  4. Bananafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vanilla, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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