Name: Cherry Pie
Ingredients: 1 pie crust; 2 cups ripe stoned cherries; 1 cup sugar; 1 teaspoon flour; 2 tablespoons butter

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

Prepare

Line your pie tin with the pie crust.
Fill it half full with ripe stoned cherries.
Sprinkle 1 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of sifted flour over the cherries.
Add dots of butter on top.
Fill the crust to the top with more cherries.
Cover with the upper crust.

Bake

Bake until golden.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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

Cherries: Provide the fruit filling that forms the body and flavour of the pie.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps draw out cherry juices as it bakes.
Flour: Thickens the cherry juices so the filling sets rather than running out.
Butter: Adds richness and fat to the filling, rounding out the tart fruit.
Pie crust: Forms the base and top that enclose the filling and hold it in shape.

“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.