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Currant Pie

A pie filled with currants, sugar, flour, and water, topped with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Currant Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Pick the currants from the stems and wash them.

  2. Line a pie tin with a rich crust.

Assemble

  1. Place the currants in the pie tin and add sugar, flour, and water.

  2. Cover with a second crust.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbly.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Supply the main fruit flavor and the tart taste of the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the currant juice to form a syrup.
Flour
Thickens the released juices so the filling holds together when sliced.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until the filling is bubbly. Flour only thickens the juices once they reach a boil. Pulling the pie early leaves the filling runny, while the crust can look done before the center has set.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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