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Dessert

Artillery Pie

A pie made with bread slices and apples, baked with suet and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,790 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Artillery Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Melt the suet in a frying pan.

  2. Cut the bread into slices ¼ inch thick.

  3. Dip each slice into the melted fat.

  4. Place the dipped slices in the oven to dry.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel the apples.

  2. Boil the apples.

  3. Mash the boiled apples with the sugar.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover the bottom of a baking dish with bread.

  2. Layer the bread with apples, repeating until all ingredients are used.

  3. Bake in the oven for 20 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. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Bread
Forms the structure of the pie, soaking up the fat and holding the layers together.
Apples
Provide the main filling, becoming soft and moist as they cook and mash.
Suet
Adds fat that coats the bread slices, adding richness and helping them crisp as they dry.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and adds body to the mashed apples.

The step that matters

Drying the fat-coated bread slices. If the bread is not dried enough, the pie can turn soggy as moisture from the apples softens it during baking. Drying the slices firmly gives them a sturdier texture that holds up under the filling.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar. 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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