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Dessert

Blackberry Cobler

A baked blackberry dessert with a rich pastry crust, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Blackberry Cobler

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.

Bake the crust

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

  2. Line a shallow baking pan with the rich pastry and bake until done but not brown.

Fill and bake

  1. Stew the blackberries and sweeten to taste.

  2. Fill the cooked crust with the hot blackberries.

  3. Dot the filling with small lumps of butter and bake until the crust is brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with solid or caramel 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rich pastry
Forms the crust that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Blackberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and the juicy filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart blackberries and balances their acidity.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crust brown as it bakes.
Flour
Thickens the blackberry juices so the filling holds together.

The step that matters

Bake the crust until set but not brown before filling. Partly baking the pastry firms it so the juicy hot filling does not soak it and make it soggy before the final browning.

“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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