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Dessert

Peach Pie

A fruit pie made with sliced peaches, brown sugar, nutmeg, and a pie crust, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Peach Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash the peaches.

  2. Slice the peaches thinly.

  3. Layer the sliced peaches in a pie dish.

  4. Sprinkle brown sugar over the peaches.

  5. Add a pinch of nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Cover with pie crust.

  2. Bake gently at 350°F until golden.

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. Peach + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit filling, supplying moisture and juicy texture as they cook.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the peach juices thicken into a syrup while baking.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and provides a golden, browned structure as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bake gently at 350°F until golden. Baking gently lets the peaches soften and release juice before the crust over-browns. Too much heat can scorch the crust while the filling stays underdone.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar. 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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