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Dessert

Green Currant Pie

A deep pie filled with currants and sugar, topped with flour and crust, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Green Currant Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Line a deep pie plate with the crust.

  2. Fill the plate with currants and sugar in alternate layers, using at least two-thirds as much sugar as fruit.

  3. Heap the fruit as it shrinks during cooking.

  4. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of flour over the top.

  5. Cover with a top crust, pricked or slit.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 45 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the tart fruit that forms the filling and its characteristic flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart currants and helps draw out juice to form the filling.
Flour
Thickens the juices released by the fruit as the pie bakes.
Deep pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and encloses it during baking.

The step that matters

Heap the fruit as it shrinks during cooking. Currants release liquid and collapse as they cook, so a heaped filling keeps the pie full and prevents a gap under the top crust.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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