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Dessert

Canned Fruit Pie

A pie filled with canned fruit, thickened with flour and nut meal, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Canned Fruit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Fill a pie crust with acid canned fruit.

  2. Thicken the fruit with 1 heaping teaspoon of white flour.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of nut meal and sweeten with about ½ cup of sugar.

Bake

  1. Place the mixture between two pie crusts and bake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Almond + sugartop 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

Acid canned fruit
Provides the main flavor and tartness of the pie.
White flour
Thickens the fruit juices so the filling sets rather than running.
Nut meal
Adds body and a toasty, nutty flavor to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the acidity of the fruit.

The step that matters

Thicken the fruit with flour. Canned fruit releases liquid as it heats, and flour must be evenly mixed in to absorb it. Unevenly distributed flour leaves runny pockets or lumps, so the filling may not set properly once baked.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Milletfits less well
  4. Cashew nutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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