Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Whortleberry or Huckleberry 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
Line a pie tin with the pie crust.
Wash the huckleberries and place them in the pie tin.
Sprinkle the huckleberries with 2 tablespoons of white flour.
Sift ½ cup of sugar over the flour.
Bake
Cover with a top crust and bake at 300°F (150°C) until done.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Huckleberries
- Provide the main filling, releasing juice that the flour thickens during baking.
- White flour
- Thickens the berry juices so the filling sets rather than running out of the crust.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps draw juice out of the berries.
- Pie crust
- Forms the base and top that enclose the filling and brown in the oven.
The step that matters
Sprinkling the flour over the huckleberries. The flour must be spread evenly over the berries so it coats them and thickens the juice as it heats. Clumps of flour leave pockets of raw starch and a loose, runny filling.
“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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