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Dessert

Cherry Pie

A fruit pie with cherries, nuts, flour, sugar, and almond crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cherry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the cherries with the chopped nuts.

  3. Place the mixture in a pie tin lined with almond crust.

Assemble and bake

  1. Sift the flour over the cherry mixture and sprinkle the sugar on top.

  2. Cover with another crust and bake slowly.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Supply the fruit filling and its juices, which the flour and sugar thicken and sweeten.
Walnuts
Add texture and a firm, crunchy contrast to the soft cherry filling.
White flour
Thickens the cherry juices as they heat, so the filling holds together when sliced.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart cherries and helps balance their acidity.

The step that matters

Sift the flour over the cherry mixture. Cherries release juice as they bake, and flour only thickens that juice if it is spread evenly through the filling. Clumps left in one spot can stay pasty while the rest runs loose.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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