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Dessert

Cherry Toite

A puff pastry cherry pie topped with a meringue and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and nuts work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 104 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cherry Toite

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Drain the juice from the cherries.

  2. Thicken the drained juice with corn starch.

  3. Return the thickened juice to the cherries.

  4. Add sugar to the cherries.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a deep pie tin with puff pastry.

  2. Pour the prepared cherries into the pie crust.

  3. Bake the pie.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks.

  2. Add sugar and chopped nuts to the beaten egg whites.

  3. Spread the egg mixture over the top of the pie.

  4. Return the pie to the oven to brown slowly.

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. Corn + nutstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

  5. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor and the body of the filling.
Corn starch
Thickens the cherry juice so the filling sets rather than running out.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form a light meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and the meringue topping.
Puff pastry
Forms the buttery, flaky crust that holds the filling.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites need to be whipped until they hold stiff peaks so the topping stays light and airy. Underwhipped whites stay runny and may sink into the filling instead of browning on top.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Peanutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, sugar, egg. 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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