Name: Good Plain Pie Crust
Ingredients: 1 heaping handful of flour; 1 heaping handful of lard or butter; 1 tablespoon sugar; apples, peeled, cored, and sliced; ½ nutmeg, grated; cinnamon sticks; small bits of butter; sugar to taste

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Good Plain Pie Crust

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 the crust

Combine flour and lard or butter in a bowl and add sugar, mixing well.
Prepare a deep dish with an under-crust.

Fill and bake

Layer the sliced apples in the dish.
Grate nutmeg over the apples.
Add cinnamon sticks and small bits of butter.
Sprinkle sugar over the filling to taste.
Cover with the top crust and seal the edges.
Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 to 2 hours.

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.

Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,598 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Flour: Forms the structure of the crust once combined with fat and baked.
Lard or butter: Adds fat that makes the crust tender and flaky.
Apples: Provide the main filling, becoming tender and releasing juices as they bake.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the apples brown in the oven.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon):

Raisinfits better
Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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.