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Dessert

Raisin Pie

A baked pie with stewed raisins, flour, sugar, eggs, and a powdered sugar icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin 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.

Make the filling

  1. Stew the raisins in a pot until soft.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour, like gravy.

  3. Sweeten to taste with brown sugar.

  4. Beat the whole egg and egg yolk with brown sugar in a bowl.

Assemble and bake

  1. Lay the stewed raisins on the pie crust and dredge with flour.

  2. Pour the egg and sugar mixture over the raisins.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

Ice and brown

  1. Whip the remaining egg white and mix with powdered sugar for icing.

  2. Brown the icing lightly under the broiler.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Raisins
Provide sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the raisin juices into a gravy-like filling.
Eggs
Set on baking to turn the liquid filling into a firm custard.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and molasses flavor that deepens the filling.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps it take on color under the broiler.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Egg proteins set as they heat, so underbaking leaves the filling runny, while overbaking makes the eggs curdle and turn grainy and weepy.

“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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