Name: Fresh Gooseberry Pie
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon flour; 1 cup sugar; ½ cup boiling water; gooseberries (fresh or canned); pie crust

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Fresh Gooseberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Mix the sugar and flour together and spread it in the bottom of the pie crust.
Fill the crust with gooseberries.
Pour the boiling water over the berries.

Bake

Cover with the top crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) like a rhubarb pie.
If using canned berries, omit the boiling water.

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.

Flour + sugartop 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

Sugar: Sweetens the filling and balances the tartness of the gooseberries.
Flour: Thickens the juices released by the berries as the pie bakes.
Gooseberries: Provide the tart fruit that forms the body and flavour of the filling.

“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.