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Dessert

Old-fashioned Apple Pie

A baked apple pie with a pastry crust, apples, brown sugar, flour, spices, lemon peel, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Old-fashioned Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a pie plate with pastry.

Fill and assemble

  1. Slice the apples and arrange them in two rows around the outer edge of the plate, filling high in the middle.

  2. Mix the brown sugar, flour, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon, then sprinkle over the apples.

  3. Add the grated lemon peel and a few dabs of butter on top.

  4. Cover the pie with another pastry layer and pinch the edges together.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and release juices that cook into the pie's body.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a syrup with the apple juices.
Flour
Thickens the juices released by the apples so the filling sets rather than running.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, contributing to flavor and browning.

The step that matters

Arrange the apples high in the middle. Apples shrink as they cook, so a filling packed high in the middle keeps the top crust from sinking into a gap and helps the slices cook evenly.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nutmeg, sugar, cinnamon, flour, lemon, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, sugar, cinnamon, flour, lemon, butter. 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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