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Dessert

Orange or Lemon Pie

A puff pastry pie filled with oranges or lemons and apples, sweetened with sugar and flavored with citrus juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange or Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Rub the oranges or lemons with salt and soak them in water with salt for 2 days, changing the water daily without salt for 2 weeks.

  2. Boil the soaked fruit until tender, then cut into thin half-quarters.

  3. Boil the peeled, cored, and quartered pippins in 1 pint of water until soft.

Make the filling

  1. Combine the cooking liquid from the pippins with the oranges or lemons, add half the pulp of the pippins, and 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons of orange or lemon juice.

Assemble and bake

  1. Roll out the puff pastry thinly and line shallow patty pans.

  2. Brush the pastry with melted butter, sprinkle with double refined sugar, and bake in the oven.

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. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges or lemons
Provide the bitter peel and juice that give the filling its characteristic flavour.
Pippins (apples)
Their pulp and cooking liquid thicken the filling and add body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it set into a thick preserve-like texture.
Puff paste
Forms the flaky, crisp shell that holds the filling.
Melted butter
Adds richness and helps the pastry brown and crisp in the oven.

The step that matters

Boiling the fruit until tender after soaking. Fruit peel that is not fully softened stays tough and bitter. Boiling until tender also lets the pectin release so the filling can thicken properly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter. 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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