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Dessert

Apple and Apricot Pie

A pie filled with stewed apricots and sliced tart apples, sweetened with sugar and maple sugar, topped with butter and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apple and Apricot Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apricot filling

  1. Soak the dried apricots overnight.

  2. Stew the apricots until tender, then pass through a sieve.

  3. Sweeten the apricot puree to taste and add lemon juice.

Assemble the pie

  1. Line a deep pie plate with pie crust.

  2. Layer thinly sliced tart apples in the crust and add water.

  3. Sprinkle with maple sugar and dot with bits of butter.

  4. Spread the stewed apricots over the apple layer.

  5. Cover with a top crust and bake.

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. Apricot + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Apricot + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apricots
Provide the main fruit flavor and, once stewed and sieved, a smooth, thick filling.
Tart apples
Add firm texture and bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, which carries flavor and browns the crust during baking.
Maple sugar
Adds sweetness with a distinct caramel-like aroma.

The step that matters

Passing the stewed apricots through a sieve. Stewed dried apricots hold fibrous skin and lumps that give a grainy texture. Pushing them through a sieve breaks these down into a smooth puree that sets evenly in the pie.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Peachfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, apple, sugar, 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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