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 ↓
Cherry Pie
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the filling
Stone the cherries and save all the juice.
Add the sugar and flour to the cherries and stir until well mixed.
Assemble and bake
Fill a pie plate lined with pastry with the cherry mixture.
Cover with the upper crust and bake until golden brown.
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.
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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cherries
- Provide the fruit and its juice, which form the body and tart flavour of the filling.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the filling and draws moisture out of the cherries to form syrup.
- Flour
- Thickens the cherry juices so the filling sets rather than running when baked.
The step that matters
Mixing the flour into the cherries. The flour must be stirred evenly through the juicy fruit. Unmixed flour forms dry clumps instead of thickening the juices uniformly, so the filling can turn runny in some spots and pasty in others.
“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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