Name: Plum Pie
Ingredients: ½ lb ripe plums; sugar to taste; some pie crust; ½ teacup water

Why it works: Plum and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,313 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Plum Pie

Ingredients

½ lb ripe plums
sugar to taste
some pie crust
½ teacup water

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

Wash the plums and place them in a small pie dish.
Pour ½ cup of water over the plums.
Add sugar to taste.

Bake

Cover the plums with pie crust.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) until the pie is golden 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.

Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,313 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums: Provide the fruit filling that gives the pie its main flavor and juicy body.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and bakes into a crisp, golden top layer.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the plums.

“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.