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Dessert

Dried Peach Pie

A pie made with soaked dried apricots or peaches, sugar, and a crust, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dried Peach Pie

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the dried apricots or peaches thoroughly and soak them overnight.

  2. Cook the soaked fruit slowly on the back of the stove for two hours.

  3. Add sugar to taste just before removing from heat.

Assemble and bake

  1. Arrange the fruit and its juice in a deep pie plate lined with pie crust.

  2. Cover with a thin layer of pie crust or create a lattice with narrow strips.

  3. If the fruit is broken, sift it before baking.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until golden.

Top with meringue

  1. Beat the egg white with 1 tablespoon of sugar until light.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pie and brown in the oven.

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. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Apricot + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,712 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apricots or peaches
Provide the main fruit flavor and body that fill the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the dried fruit.
Pie crust
Forms the base and cover that hold the fruit filling.
Egg white
Whipped into a meringue that sets and browns on top of the pie.

The step that matters

Beat the egg white with sugar until light. Egg white whipped with sugar forms a stable foam that holds its volume and browns well in the oven. Under-whipped whites slump and weep.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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.

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