Name: Berry Pie
Ingredients: 1 quart berries; 1 cup sugar; flour for sprinkling; 2 pie crusts

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 ↓

Berry Pie

Ingredients

1 quart berries
1 cup sugar
flour for sprinkling
2 pie crusts

Directions

Prepare the filling

Pick over the berries and sprinkle them lightly with flour.
Add 1 cup of sugar to the quart of fruit.
Do not add spices, so the fruit flavor is preserved.

Bake

Bake the pie with two crusts.

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.

Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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

Berries: Provide the main fruit flavor, moisture and bulk of the filling.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and draws juice out of the fruit to form a syrup.
Flour: Thickens the fruit juices as they heat, so the filling sets rather than running.
Pie crusts: Form the structure that encloses the filling and browns during baking.

“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.