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Dessert

An Apple Pie

A puff pastry apple pie with sugar, lemon, cloves, mace, and optional quince or marmalade, finished with optional butter or cream topping.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pie

  1. Prepare a puff-paste crust and line the sides of a pie dish with it.

  2. Core and quarter the apples.

  3. Layer half of the apples in the dish, then sprinkle half of the sugar over them.

  4. Add minced lemon peel, squeeze some lemon juice on top, and add a few cloves.

  5. Layer the remaining apples and sprinkle the rest of the sugar over them.

  6. Adjust sweetness to your taste and add a bit more lemon juice.

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.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the syrup into the pie and cover with the upper crust.

  2. Bake.

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

  4. Optionally prepare a cream mixture with egg yolks, cream, and nutmeg to pour over the pie.

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 bulk of the filling and give the pie its fruity body as they soften.
Puff-paste crust
Forms a flaky, structural shell that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juices that form the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the apples.
Lemon peel
Contributes aromatic oils that add citrus fragrance to the filling.

The step that matters

Adjust sweetness and lemon juice before covering. Apples release juice and their flavor concentrates during baking, so the filling should taste slightly sweeter and brighter than desired before the crust seals it in, since tasting afterward is not possible.

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.

More apple pie recipes

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