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Dessert

Rips Currant Pie

A pie filled with currants and sugar, topped with flour and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Rips Currant 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. Remove stems and wash the currants.

  2. Line pie plates with the pie crust.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the crust with currants and add sugar.

  2. Dredge flour over the top.

  3. Cover with the pie lid, leaving an opening in the center.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the main fruit flavor and tart juice that fills the pie.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart currants and helps draw out their juice.
Flour
Dredged over the fruit to thicken the juices as the pie bakes.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Leaving an opening in the center of the lid. The opening lets steam escape while the pie bakes. Without it, pressure can build under the crust and cause the juices to burst out or the top to sag.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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