Skip to main content
Dessert

Strawberry Pie

A pie with apple sauce, strawberries, powdered sugar, and apple jelly baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Strawberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a pie plate with the pie crust.

Bake the base

  1. Spread the apple sauce evenly in the crust.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove from the oven.

  3. Dredge the crust edge with powdered sugar and return to the oven for 2 minutes to melt the sugar.

  4. Let the pie cool completely.

Fill and serve

  1. Remove half of the apple sauce and fill the pie with strawberries mixed with powdered sugar.

  2. Spread the apple jelly evenly over the strawberries and serve.

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. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apple + saucetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Strawberries
Provide the fresh fruit filling and its bright flavour and colour.
Apple sauce
Forms a soft, moist layer under the fruit in the crust.
Apple jelly
Glazes the strawberries, adding shine and a light sweetness.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and melts on the crust edge to add a glaze.

The step that matters

Let the pie cool completely. Filling a warm pie causes the apple sauce and jelly to run and soften, so the layers lose their shape and the glaze becomes runny. Full cooling lets the base set before the fruit is added.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

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

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes