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Raisin Pie

A sweet pie filling made with raisins, lemon, sugar, egg, flour, and water, cooked in a double boiler and baked between crusts.

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 filling

  1. Soak the raisins in 1 cup of cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Beat the egg with the sugar until light.

  3. Add the juice of the lemon and mix in the flour.

  4. Stir in the soaked raisins and the water they were soaked in.

Cook and bake

  1. Cook the mixture in a double boiler until it thickens.

  2. Bake the filling between two pie crusts.

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

Raisins
Provide the main body of the filling, along with chewy texture and natural sweetness.
Egg
Helps bind and thicken the filling as it cooks, giving it a set structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and adds body when beaten with the egg.
Flour
Thickens the filling, helping it hold its shape once cooked.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the raisins and sugar.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture in a double boiler until it thickens. Gentle, indirect heat lets the egg and flour thicken the filling evenly. Overheating can curdle the egg or scorch the mixture, so it should be stirred and cooked only until it thickens.

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.

More raisin pie recipes

Lemon 28Apple 17Cranberry 7Molasses 6Sour Cream 4 See all 104 →

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