Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Pie

A pie filled with currants, sugar, and flour, baked in a flaky crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Currant Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Line a pie plate with Good Plain Paste or Flaky Pie-Crust.

  2. Layer the currants in the pie dish.

  3. Sprinkle a layer of sugar over the currants.

  4. Add another layer of currants followed by another layer of sugar.

  5. Dredge 1 tablespoon of flour over the top.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover with paste, trim and notch the edges, and cut an X in the center.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the fruit filling and its tart, juicy flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart currants and helps draw out their juices.
Flour
Thickens the currant juices so the filling sets rather than running.
Good plain paste or flaky pie-crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Dredge the flour evenly over the fruit. Flour thickens the juices released by the currants as they heat. If it clumps or is unevenly spread, pockets of raw flour remain and the filling may be runny in places or pasty in others.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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 currant pie recipes

Green 13 See all 67 →

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes