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Dessert

Blackberry Pie

A pie made with ripe blackberries, flour, sugar, and optional egg white meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar 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 ↓

Blackberry 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. Line a pie plate with the pie crust.

  2. Wash the blackberries and place them in the pie dish, keeping them centered.

  3. Dust the blackberries with 2 tablespoons of flour.

  4. Add 1 cup of sugar to the blackberries.

  5. Make a paste with 1 teaspoon of flour and a little water.

  6. Brush the paste over the edge of the bottom crust to seal in the juice.

  7. Add the top crust and trim any excess with a sharp knife.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden.

  2. Dust the pie with powdered sugar.

  3. Cover the pie with a thin meringue made from the egg white and 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar.

  4. Serve plain if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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

Blackberries
Provide the main fruit filling, supplying flavour, colour and juice.
Flour
Thickens the blackberry juices so the filling sets rather than running out.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps balance the tartness of the berries.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Egg white
Forms a thin meringue topping that adds a light, crisp layer when baked.

The step that matters

Sealing the bottom crust edge. Brushing the flour paste on the edge helps the top and bottom crusts bond. Without a seal, juice escapes during baking, leaving the filling thin and the crust soggy.

“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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