Name: Blackberry Pie
Ingredients: blackberries; ½ cup sugar; 1 tablespoon water; flour for dusting; pie crust (under-crust and upper-crust)

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 ↓

Blackberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Carefully wash the blackberries.
Place them in a pie tin lined with an under-crust.
Add ½ cup sugar and 1 tablespoon water to the berries.

Assemble and bake

Dust the top with flour.
Cover with an upper crust.
Bake for 1 hour.

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.

Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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

Blackberries: Supply the juicy fruit filling and its tart, aromatic flavour.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and draws juice out of the berries.
Pie crust: Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

“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.