Name: Peach Pie
Ingredients: Peaches; 1½ cups sugar; 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

Peaches
1½ cups sugar
Puff pastry

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

Peel and slice the peaches thinly.
Roll out the puff pastry until thin.

Assemble the pie

Line a pie plate with the pastry.
Fill the plate half full with peaches.
Add 1 cup of sugar.
Fill the plate with more peaches and a little more sugar.
Cover with puff pastry.

Bake

Bake for 45 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

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 fruit filling, adding juice, flavor and soft texture as they cook.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and draws juice out of the peaches, which helps form a syrupy filling.
Puff pastry: Forms the flaky crust, with layers of fat that puff and separate as the pastry bakes.

“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.