Name: Huckleberry Pie
Ingredients: 1 quart huckleberries; ½ cup sugar; 1 tablespoon vinegar; flour (for sprinkling); best winter wheat flour (for pastry); 1 teaspoon corn-starch (optional, for puff paste); ice cream (for serving)

Why it works: Wheat and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Huckleberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

Cook the huckleberries until soft, then cool them.
Mix the sugar and vinegar with the berries while cooking.

Assemble and bake

Sprinkle a little flour into the pie dish before adding the top crust.
Bake the pie as you would any other pie.

Serve

Serve cold with a slice of ice cream on top.

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.

Wheat + corntop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together465 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,373 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,165 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Huckleberries: Provide the main fruit body and flavour of the filling once cooked down.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps draw out juice from the berries as they cook.
Vinegar: Adds a touch of acidity that brightens the flavour of the berries.
Best winter wheat flour: Forms the structure of the pastry crust.

“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.