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Dessert

Rhubarb Pie

A baked pie with rhubarb, sugar, egg yolk, butter, flour, water, topped with a stiff-egg-white sugar meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Rhubarb Pie

Why it works: Rhubarb and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 670 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Pour boiling water over the chopped rhubarb and let it sit for 4-5 minutes.

  2. Drain the water and mix the rhubarb with sugar, egg yolk, butter, flour, and water.

  3. Place the mixture in a pie dish with a lower crust only.

Bake and top

  1. Bake until done.

  2. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread the egg white mixture over the top of the pie and return to the oven until golden.

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.

  1. Rhubarb + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rhubarb + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rhubarb
Provides the tart flavour and bulk that the filling is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart rhubarb and helps form the meringue topping.
Egg yolk
Thickens the filling and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it sets rather than running out when sliced.
Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that becomes light and golden on top.

The step that matters

Spreading the meringue over the filling. Egg whites whipped with sugar form a stable foam only when beaten until stiff peaks form. Under-whipped meringue weeps and slides into the filling, while the golden browning depends on the topping being spread over the whole surface and baked until golden.

Swap the rhubarb

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Rhubarbthe original

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