Name: Rhubarb Pie
Ingredients: 4 cups rhubarb, cut into small pieces; 1 cup sugar; 1 pie crust

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients

4 cups rhubarb, cut into small pieces
1 cup sugar
1 pie crust

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Remove the skin from the rhubarb and cut it into small pieces.
Mix the rhubarb with sugar in a bowl.
Place the rhubarb mixture into the pie crust.

Bake

Bake in the preheated oven until the crust is golden and the rhubarb is tender.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,852 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb: Provides the tart flavour and the filling that cooks to a tender texture.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart rhubarb and helps draw out moisture to form the filling.
Pie crust: Holds the filling and browns in the oven to form the base of the pie.

“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.