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Dessert

Whortleberry Pie

A pie made with whortleberries, sugar, and pastry crust, optionally flavored with red currants or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Whortleberry Pie

Ingredients

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 and bake

  1. Wash and pick over the whortleberries.

  2. Place the berries in a pie dish, an inch thick, on the bottom crust.

  3. Cover the berries thickly with sugar.

  4. Add the upper crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix in a few red currants (optional).

  2. Sprinkle lemon juice among the berries (optional).

  3. Sift powdered sugar over the pie before serving.

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. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Whortleberries
Provide the main filling, with their fruit flavour and juice.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and draws out their juice as the pie bakes.
Pastry
Forms the upper and lower crust that hold the juicy filling.

The step that matters

Cover the berries thickly with sugar. Sugar sweetens the fruit and draws out its juice. Enough sugar keeps the filling sweet and balances the tartness of the berries.

Swap the red currant

The recipe marks red currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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