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Dessert

An Apple Pie

A puff pastry apple pie with optional lemon, cloves, mace, and optional cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

An Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust and apples

  1. Prepare a puff-paste crust.

  2. Line the sides of a pie dish.

  3. Remove the cores from the quartered apples.

  4. Layer half of the apples in the dish. Sprinkle half of the sugar over the apples. Add minced lemon peel. Squeeze some lemon juice on top. Add a few cloves.

  5. Layer the remaining apples. Sprinkle with the rest of the sugar.

  6. Adjust sweetness with more sugar and lemon juice if desired.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the apple peelings and cores with a blade of mace in a little water until flavorful.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Boil the syrup with a little sugar until thick.

  4. Pour the syrup into the pie.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover with the upper crust.

  2. Bake.

  3. Optionally, butter the pie when it comes out of the oven.

  4. Optionally, prepare a cream sauce with egg yolks, cream, nutmeg, and sugar, stirring until it just boils.

  5. Serve the pie with the cream sauce poured over it.

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. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Form the filling, supplying bulk, tartness and the body of the pie.
Puff-paste crust
Forms the flaky, golden enclosure that holds the filling in the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juices that form the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the apples.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the cream sauce as it heats.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Reducing the apple-peel syrup concentrates its flavor and pectin so it sets lightly rather than running out of the pie when cut.

Swap the quince

The recipe marks quince as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, lemon, clove, mace, butter, egg):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Blackberryfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, lemon, clove, mace, butter, 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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