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Dessert

Apple Apricot Pie

A fruit pie made with apples, apricots, butter, cinnamon, and sugar, baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Apricot 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.

Make the filling

  1. Combine apricots and apples in a pan.

  2. Add a little water and boil until soft.

  3. Run the mixture through a colander and sweeten to taste.

  4. Let the filling cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a pie dish with pie dough and fill it with the mixture.

  2. Drizzle melted butter over the filling and sprinkle with cinnamon.

  3. Cover with top crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until light brown.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apricot + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 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

Apricots
Provide the main fruit flavor and tartness, and break down into the filling's body.
Apples
Add body and pectin-rich softness so the cooked filling holds together.
Sugar
Sweetens the cooked fruit and balances the apricots' tartness.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor across the filling.
Pie dough
Forms the crust that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the filling cool. Hot fruit filling softens the dough and can make the bottom crust soggy, so cooling before assembly helps the crust bake crisp.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter, 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.

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