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Dessert

Apple Pie with Under Crust

A pie made with a pastry bottom crust and sliced apples seasoned with sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon juice, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Pie with Under Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Line a pie plate with pastry.

  2. Prepare the apples by slicing them.

Fill

  1. Fill the pie plate with apples, mounding the center slightly.

  2. Sprinkle the apples with sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, or lemon juice.

  3. Dot the filling with small pieces of butter.

Assemble and bake

  1. Moisten the edge of the pastry with cold water.

  2. Score the upper crust, place it over the filling, and press the edges down.

  3. Bake in a hot oven at 450°F (230°C) for about 40 minutes, reducing the temperature slightly during the last 10 minutes.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Apples
Form the bulk of the filling and soften into a tender, juicy layer as they bake.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and bakes into a crisp, browned crust.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the apples.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling as it melts over the apples.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma that complements the apples.

The step that matters

Mounding the apples in the pie plate. Apples shrink and release juice as they bake, so a slightly mounded center keeps the finished pie from sinking and leaves room for the top crust to sit well.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, butter. 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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