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
Stone the cherries.
Line deep pie plates with pie crust.
Fill and cover
Fill the plates nearly with cherries.
Sprinkle ¼ cup sugar over each pie and dredge lightly with flour.
Cover each pie with a thin upper crust.
Make a vent in the center and press the edges together to seal.
Bake and serve
Bake until golden and serve the same day.
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
- Common red or morella cherries
- Supply the fruit filling, whose juices become a sweet-tart syrup as they bake.
- Good plain pie crust
- Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the tart cherries and draws out juice that thickens the filling.
- Flour
- Dredged over the fruit, it thickens the cherry juices as the pie bakes.
The step that matters
Make the vent and seal the edges. Cherries release a lot of juice as they heat. A vent lets steam escape, and pressed edges keep the juice inside, so the filling bubbles through the crust rather than leaking out and burning.
“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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