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Dessert

Peach Cobbler

A baked dessert of peaches topped with puff pastry and sweetened with sugar and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 339 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Cobbler

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. Line a pudding dish with puff pastry.

  3. Peel, halve, and stone the peaches.

  4. Scatter the peach kernels among the halved peaches.

  5. Sweeten the peaches generously.

  6. Pour in a glass of brandy for every cup of fruit.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover with pastry, pinching the edges to seal in the brandy.

  2. Cover the crust with paper to prevent burning.

  3. Bake for 1 hour or until the crust is 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. Peach + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together339 recipes

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

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that encloses the fruit and brandy.
Ripe peaches
Provide the fruit filling that becomes soft and juicy as it bakes.
Peach kernels
Add a subtle almond-like aroma to the peach filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the peaches and helps them release juice that thickens the filling.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to the fruit filling inside the sealed crust.

The step that matters

Cover the crust with paper to prevent burning.. Puff pastry browns quickly at high oven heat, while the peaches still need time to soften. A paper cover shields the crust so it can finish cooking through without scorching.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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