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Dessert

Ripe Berry Pies

A fruit pie made with berries, crust, optional flour, sugar, ginger, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ripe Berry Pies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Line your pie tin with crust.

  2. Fill it half full with berries.

  3. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of sifted flour over the berries if they are very juicy.

  4. Add enough sugar to sweeten the berries to your liking.

  5. Fill the crust to the top with more berries.

  6. Cover with another layer of crust.

  7. For huckleberry and blackberry pies, add a little ginger and cinnamon if desired.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 40 minutes.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Berries
Provide the main filling, with their juice and flavour forming the body of the pie.
Sifted flour
Absorbs excess juice from very juicy berries so the filling sets rather than running.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and helps draw out juice that thickens the filling as it bakes.

The step that matters

Sprinkling flour over very juicy berries. Berries release liquid as they heat, and flour binds some of that juice. Without it, a very juicy filling can stay runny and make the bottom crust soggy.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, cinnamon. 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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