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Dessert

Raisin Pie

A fruit pie with raisins, lemon, sugar, egg, flour, and water, baked in a double crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raisin Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the raisins

  1. Seed the large, soft raisins and soak them in 1 cup of cold water for 2 hours.

Make the filling

  1. Beat the egg until light, then mix in the sugar, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Stir in the soaked raisins and the water they were soaked in, and cook until the mixture thickens.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the filling into a pie crust and cover with a second crust.

  2. Bake until golden 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg
Beaten egg helps bind the filling and set it as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the filling as it cooks, giving it a spoonable body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the tart lemon.
Raisins
Provide chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the filling.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma that cut through the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling until it thickens. Flour and egg must be heated enough to swell and set. If the filling is undercooked it stays runny and can soften the bottom crust once baked.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits about as well

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