Name: Blackberry Pie
Ingredients: 4 cups blackberries; ½ cup sugar; 1 tablespoon water; flour for dusting; 1 pie crust (for bottom); 1 pie crust (for top)

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

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Carefully wash the blackberries and place them in a pie tin lined with the bottom crust.

Assemble and bake

Add ½ cup sugar and 1 tablespoon water to the berries.
Dust the top with flour.
Cover with the top crust and 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: Provide the main fruit filling, with juice that thickens and flavors the pie as it bakes.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps draw juice from the berries.
Pie crust: Forms the bottom and top shell that holds the filling while it bakes.

“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.