Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Pie

Apple Pie is a pastry filled with apples, sugar, cinnamon, and optional cider, baked until golden.

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

Prepare the filling

  1. Pare and core the apples, wiping the outside clean.

  2. Boil the apple peels and cores with a little water until flavorful; strain.

  3. Add sugar and bruised cinnamon to the strained liquid and simmer again.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place a layer of apples in a dish and add a pastry edge.

  2. Sprinkle half the sugar, lemon peel, and a splash of cider if needed over the apples.

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

  4. Cover with pastry and bake until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter or flavor with marmalade, orange paste, or cloves if desired.

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
Form the bulk of the filling, cooking down to soft, tender slices.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples release juices that form the syrup.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the crust.
Apple peels and cores
Boiled into a liquid that adds concentrated apple flavor to the filling.
Bruised cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavor to the simmered liquid.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Baking long enough sets the juices into a thickened filling and fully browns the pastry; underbaking leaves a runny filling and pale, soggy crust.

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