Name: Peach Pie
Ingredients: good pastry for pie; peaches; ½ cup water; 1 cup sugar; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Line a deep pie dish with good pastry.
Peel the peaches, leaving them whole.

Assemble and bake

Add the peaches to the dish with water, sugar, and salt.
Cover the dish with pastry and bake.

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.

Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches: Provide the fruit filling, and their juices cook down into the sauce around them.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and draws moisture out of the fruit, adding to the syrup.
Good pastry for pie: Forms the crust that holds the filling in and browns in the oven.

“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.