Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Pie

A pie made with peeled and cored apples, water, sugar, cinnamon, lemon zest and juice, optional cider, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and cider are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the apple cores with water until flavorful, then strain.

  2. Add sugar and cinnamon to the strained liquid and simmer.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the pie crust in a dish and fill with a layer of apples.

  2. Sprinkle half the sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice (or cider) over the apples.

  3. Add the remaining apples, sugar, and the boiled liquid.

  4. Cover with the pie crust and bake until golden.

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 + cidertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Apples
Make up the filling, softening as they bake to form the body of the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples and liquid caramelize and brown in the oven.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the apple flavor, and its zest adds aroma.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, aromatic spice to the cooking liquid that flavors the apples.
Pie crust
Holds the filling in place and browns to a golden finish in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cinnamon, cider, 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.

More apple pie recipes

Green 20Dried 19English 13Mock 13German 10Lemon 10 See all 369 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes