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Dessert

Shoo Fly Pie

A sweet pie with a syrup base and a crumbly topping of flour, sugar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Shoo Fly 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 the filling

  1. Line a pie tin with the crust.

  2. In a cup, mix 3 tablespoons of syrup with ½ teaspoon of baking soda.

  3. Pour 2 tablespoons of boiling water over the mixture and stir well.

  4. Pour the mixture into the crust.

Add the crumb topping

  1. In a bowl, combine 1 heaping cup of flour, ½ cup of brown sugar, and the butter, rubbing them together with your hands.

  2. Sprinkle this mixture over the syrup in the crust without stirring.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Syrup + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,540 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Syrup
Forms the sweet, dark, gooey base layer of the pie.
Baking soda
Reacts with the hot water and syrup so the filling puffs and lightens as it bakes.
All-purpose flour
Combines with butter and sugar to form the crumb topping that sinks into the syrup.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture and molasses flavor to the crumb topping and helps it brown.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour and sugar to create a crumbly, tender topping.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the crumb topping without stirring. Stirring would blend the crumbs into the syrup and remove the separate layer. Leaving them on top lets the wet syrup layer form beneath as the pie bakes.

“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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