Name: Peach Pie
Ingredients: 4 cups sliced peaches; 1 cup sugar; 1 pie crust (puff pastry)

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Pie

Ingredients

4 cups sliced peaches
1 cup sugar
1 pie crust (puff pastry)

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

Peel and slice the peaches thinly.
Roll out the pie crust until thin and line a pie plate with it.

Fill and bake

Fill the plate halfway with peaches and add ½ cup of sugar.
Add more peaches to fill the plate and sprinkle with additional sugar.
Cover with puff pastry and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 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.

Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches: Provide the main filling, with moisture and fruity flavor as they cook.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and draws moisture out of the peaches to form syrup.
Puff pastry: Forms the flaky, golden crust that covers the filling.

“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.