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Dessert

Blackberry Pie

A pie filled with blackberries, sugar, butter, and optional flour, baked in a crust.

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 Pie

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.

Prepare

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

  2. Line a deep pie dish with the pie crust.

Fill the pie

  1. Fill the dish half full with blackberries.

  2. Add ½ cup sugar and 1 tablespoon butter.

  3. If the berries are very juicy, sprinkle in 1 tablespoon of flour.

  4. Add more blackberries and sugar as needed.

Bake

  1. Cover with a good crust and bake until golden brown.

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

Blackberries
Provide the main flavour and the juice that forms the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart berries and helps draw out their juice.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling.
Flour
Absorbs the berry juice and thickens the filling as it bakes.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling in the dish.

The step that matters

Adding flour to juicy berries. Berries release juice when heated. Flour absorbs that liquid and thickens it as it bakes. Without it, the juice can run out and leave the filling watery.

“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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