Skip to main content
Dessert

English Apple Pie

A layered pie made with butter, apple sauce, and pie crust, finished with hot sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

English Apple 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).

  2. Melt a small piece of butter in a pan.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add apple sauce to the pan.

  2. Cover the apple sauce with pie crust.

  3. Bake until the crust is golden.

  4. Add more apple sauce and another layer of crust.

  5. Repeat until the pan is filled.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot sauce.

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. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Apple + saucetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the pan and helps keep the pie from sticking.
Apple sauce
Provides the moist, sweet fruit filling that makes up the body of the pie.
Pie crust
Forms the layers that enclose the filling and turns golden as it bakes.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce. 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 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes