Skip to main content
Dessert

New England Blueberry Pie

A blueberry pie made with fresh blueberries, sugar, flour, butter, and pie crusts, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

New England Blueberry 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 the filling

  1. Wash the blueberries.

  2. Dredge the blueberries with flour.

  3. Mix in ½ cup of sugar for each pint of berries.

Assemble the pie

  1. Line a pie dish with the bottom crust and fill it with the blueberry mixture.

  2. Dot the filling with butter.

  3. Cover with the top crust.

  4. Seal the edges.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven 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. Flour + buttertop 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).

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

Blueberries
Provide the main filling, with their juices thickening as the pie bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws moisture from the berries to form a syrup.
Flour
Coats the berries so their released juices thicken into a set filling rather than running.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that melts over the filling as it bakes.
Pie crusts
Enclose the filling and give the pie its structure and browned exterior.

The step that matters

Seal the edges. A well-sealed rim keeps the juicy filling inside while it bakes. If the edges leak, sugary juice escapes, burns on the dish, and the pie can end up under-filled.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes