Skip to main content
Dessert

Special Pie

A baked pie with apples, raisins, sugar, cloves, nutmeg, and butter, topped with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Special Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Make a pie crust and line the bottom of a shallow baking tin.

  2. Chop the apples and layer them on the pie crust.

  3. Add a layer of chopped raisins, sugar, small pieces of butter, cloves, and nutmeg.

  4. Cover with crust and bake for 2 hours at 300°F (150°C).

Serve

  1. When serving, turn out into a dish and sift white sugar over it.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and tart flavor that balances the sweetness.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling as it melts during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juices from the fruit.

The step that matters

Baking the covered pie for 2 hours at 300°F. Low, slow heat lets the apples soften fully and the filling thicken without the crust over-browning. Too high a heat can scorch the crust before the apples are tender.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, clove, nutmeg, butter. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipes