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Dessert

French Apple Pie

A pastry crust filled with a baked apple puree sweetened with sugar and butter, finished with a top crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Apple 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 the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a pie plate with puff pastry and brush it with beaten egg.

  3. Prick the pastry with a fork and bake until light and brown.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mash the baked apples into a puree.

  2. Mix in sugar, butter, lemon rind, and egg yolks.

  3. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes, then pour it into the baked crust.

Finish and bake

  1. Cover with strips of pastry and bake until brown.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry
Forms the crisp, flaky base and top crust of the pie.
Baked apples
Provide the main body, moisture and apple flavour of the filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the apple puree as they cook, giving it a custard-like set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the apple and egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks set when heated, so the mixture must be cooked gently and long enough to thicken. If it is undercooked it may stay runny and soak the crust; overcooked, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, butter, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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