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Dessert

Raspberry Pie

A fruit pie with raspberries, sugar, flour, and a meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Raspberry 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

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

  2. Line a pie dish with pastry.

  3. Wash the raspberries carefully.

  4. Spread the raspberries over the crust, keeping them in the center.

  5. Sprinkle the raspberries with 2 tablespoons of sifted flour and 1 cup of sugar.

  6. Make a paste by stirring 1 teaspoon of flour into a little water.

  7. Brush the paste over the edge of the crust.

  8. Add the top crust and trim the edges neatly with a sharp knife.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake the pie in the preheated oven.

  2. Make a meringue by beating the egg white and gradually adding 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar.

  3. Add the meringue to the pie just before removing it from the oven.

  4. Allow the meringue to set.

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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and egg 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

Raspberries
Provide the main fruit filling, along with tartness and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps balance the tartness of the raspberries.
Flour
Sifted over the fruit, it thickens the juices as the pie bakes.
Egg white
Whipped with powdered sugar to form a light meringue topping that sets when baked.

The step that matters

Add the meringue just before removing the pie from the oven. Meringue sets quickly with heat but can weep or shrink if overbaked, so timing it near the end keeps it light and tender.

“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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