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Dessert

Sour Cream Pie

A sweet pie with a sour cream filling, raisins, and spices baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sour Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs, sugar, flour, raisins, and spices together.

  2. Add the vinegar and sour cream, then mix until well combined.

  3. Pour the mixture between two pie crusts.

Bake

  1. Bake until set and 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.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Set the filling into a custard-like structure as they bake.
Sour cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the filling a tender, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the filling slightly so it holds together when sliced.
Vinegar
Adds a little acidity that brightens the sweet, rich filling.

The step that matters

Bake until set and golden. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Underbaking leaves the filling runny, while overbaking can make it dry and cause it to crack or weep.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, milk, egg, sugar, flour, vinegar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Strawberryfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, egg, sugar, flour, vinegar. 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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