Name: Peach Pie
Ingredients: peaches; pie crust; ¼ cup water; 1 cup sugar; butter

Why it works: Peach and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 860 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Peach Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

Pare, halve, and remove the stones from enough peaches for your pie plate.
Place the peach halves in cold water to prevent discoloration.

Assemble and bake

Line a pie plate with the crust.
Drain the peaches and fill the crust with peach pieces.
Add ¼ cup of water, sprinkle with a little flour, and add 1 cup of sugar.
Dot with a few bits of butter, cover with the upper 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.

Peach + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together860 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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 fruit filling that gives the pie its flavor and body.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps draw moisture from the fruit to form the filling.
Butter: Adds richness and fat that contributes flavor to the filling and crust.
Pie crust: Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.