Skip to main content
Dessert

Dried Apple Pie

A pie made with soaked and stewed apples, sugar, butter, lemon slices, and nutmeg or cinnamon, baked with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Dried Apple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Soak the apples overnight in enough water to cover them.

  2. In the morning, stew the apples until soft.

  3. Let the apples cool, then fill a pie plate lined with crust.

Fill and bake

  1. Sprinkle the apples with sugar, add bits of butter, and lemon slices.

  2. Alternatively, mash the apples and mix with sugar, butter, and nutmeg or cinnamon.

  3. Bake with an upper crust or lattice made from thin strips of dough.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Form the filling; softening by stewing turns them tender enough to slice or mash.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the filling.
Pie crust
Holds the filling in the pie plate and forms the structure around it.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, lemon, nutmeg. 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 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes