Name: Peach Pie
Ingredients: 1 pie crust; 4 cups sliced peaches; ¾ cup sugar

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Pie

Ingredients

1 pie crust
4 cups sliced peaches
¾ cup sugar

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Line a pie tin with the pie crust.

Fill and bake

Fill the crust with sliced peaches.
Sprinkle the peaches generously with sugar.
Cover with the upper 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.

Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pie crust: Forms the base and top that hold the filling and brown in the oven.
Peaches: Supply the fruit filling, its flavour, and most of its moisture.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps draw out the peaches' juices.

“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.