Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓
Cherry Pie
Ingredients
Directions
Assemble the filling
Line your pie tin with the pie crust.
Fill it half full with the stoned cherries.
Sprinkle the sugar and flour over the cherries.
Dot the filling with butter.
Fill the crust to the top with more cherries.
Bake
Cover with the upper crust and bake until golden.
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 + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Flour and butter 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
- Pie crust
- Holds the filling in the tin and browns in the oven to form the pie's structure.
- Cherries
- Provide the main filling, with their juices supplying moisture and tart fruit flavor.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the filling and draws out cherry juice that forms the syrup.
- Flour
- Thickens the cherry juices as the pie bakes, so the filling holds together when sliced.
- Butter
- Adds fat for richness and a rounder flavor in the filling.
The step that matters
Sprinkle the sugar and flour over the cherries. Flour thickens the juices only when it is spread evenly through them. Clumps can leave raw, pasty pockets and a 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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