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Dessert

To Make a Cherry Pie

A pie made with cherries, sugar, and a crust, optionally with red currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and red currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Make a Cherry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Prepare a good crust.

  2. Line the edges of the dish with a little crust.

Fill the pie

  1. Sprinkle sugar at the bottom of the dish.

  2. Add the cherries and sprinkle some sugar on top.

  3. Optionally add red currants for extra flavor.

Bake

  1. Cover with a lid and bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C).

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. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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 filling, with tartness and flavor that sweetens as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juices from the cherries.
Good crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Red currants
Add extra tartness and aroma to the cherry filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the lid and baking low. A tight seal keeps cherry juices from escaping and thickening unevenly. A slow oven at a steady temperature lets the filling set and the crust bake through without burning.

“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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