Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Cherry Pie
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the filling
Line your pie plate with the crust.
Fill it half full with pitted cherries.
Sprinkle the cherries with sugar and flour.
Dot with butter.
Finish and bake
Fill the crust to the top with more cherries.
Cover with the upper crust and bake.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
- Cherries
- Form the main filling and release juice that the sugar and flour turn into a syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the filling and draws juice out of the cherries.
- Flour
- Thickens the cherry juices as they heat so the filling sets rather than running.
- Butter
- Adds richness and a rounded flavour to the filling.
- Pie crust
- Holds the filling in its shape and browns in the oven.
The step that matters
Sprinkling the sugar and flour over the cherries. Flour thickens the juices only when it is spread evenly through them. Clumps can leave raw, pasty pockets, and uneven sugar makes some cherries sweeter than others.
“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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