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Dessert

Plum Pie

A pastry pie filled with damson plums, cinnamon, and sugar, topped with a simple batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Plum 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.

Assemble the pie

  1. Line a pan with puff pastry.

  2. Add a layer of damson plums.

  3. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.

Bake and top

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the crust is done.

  2. In a bowl, mix eggs, sugar, cold water, flour, and baking powder to make the batter.

  3. Pour the batter over the baked pie.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Puff pastry
Forms the crisp, flaky base that holds the filling.
Damson plums
Provide the tart fruit filling and its main flavour.
Eggs
Set the batter and give it structure as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives it body as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lighten the batter and help it rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and batter and helps the top brown.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, sugar, egg, flour. 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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