Name: Mock Cherry Pie
Ingredients: ½ cup almond extract; ½ cup vanilla extract; ¼ teaspoon salt; 2 pie crusts (or 1 crust with strips on top)

Why it works: Almond and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,961 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Mock Cherry Pie

Ingredients

½ cup almond extract
½ cup vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon salt
2 pie crusts (or 1 crust with strips on top)

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Mix almond extract, vanilla extract, and salt in a bowl.

Assemble

Pour the mixture into the pie crust.
Cover with the second crust or create a lattice with strips.

Bake and finish

Bake until golden brown.
Omit flavoring if desired.

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.

Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,961 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Almond extract: Provides the main almond aroma and flavour that stands in for cherry.
Vanilla extract: Adds a warm, sweet aroma that rounds out the almond flavour.
Pie crusts: Form the enclosing structure around the filling and brown in the oven.

“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.