Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Cherry Pie
Ingredients
Directions
Line your pie tin with the pie crust.
Fill it half full with ripe stoned cherries.
Sprinkle 1 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of sifted flour over the cherries.
Fill the crust to the top with more cherries.
Cover with the upper crust and bake until golden.
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.
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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Ripe stoned cherries
- Provide the fruit, juice and main flavour that the filling is built around.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps draw juice out of the cherries to form a syrup.
- Flour
- Thickens the cherry juice as the pie bakes so the filling sets rather than running.
- Pie crust
- Forms the container for the filling and browns to a golden, structured shell.
The step that matters
Sprinkling the sugar and flour over the cherries. Flour thickens the juice only where it touches it. Spreading the mixture evenly across the cherries, rather than leaving it in one spot, helps the filling set uniformly and avoids pockets of runny juice.
“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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