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Dessert

Nut Foods

A pastry with apples, raisins, and nut butter baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Foods

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Mix the meal, flour, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add water and roll out the mixture without kneading.

Fill and bake

  1. Sprinkle half of the sugar and almond meal mixture over the paste in the bottom of the pan.

  2. Fill the pan with the prepared apples and drop raisins into the spaces.

  3. Sprinkle the remaining sugar and almond meal over the top of the fruit, especially near the edges.

  4. Cover with the top crust and bake until the apples are tender.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Meal
Forms the base structure of the crust dough.
Flour
Provides structure to the crust so it holds together when rolled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling taste balanced against the tart apples.
Almond meal
Adds nutty flavor and absorbs juices from the apples under the crust.
Tart apples
Supply the main filling, softening during baking while keeping their shape.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, almond, raisin, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, almond, raisin, butter. 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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