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Dessert

English Apple Pie

A deep-dish apple pie with a pastry crust, apples, sugar, lemon zest, cloves, mace, and quince or marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

English Apple 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 the filling

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line the sides of a deep dish with pastry.

  3. Layer half of the quartered apples in the dish and sprinkle with half of the sugar, lemon zest, and cloves.

  4. Add the remaining apples and sugar, then drizzle with lemon juice.

Make the apple syrup

  1. In a saucepan, boil the apple cores and peelings in water with the mace until soft.

  2. Press the mixture through a colander, then boil with 2 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Pour the strained mixture into the pie, adding quince or marmalade.

Bake

  1. Cover with the upper crust and bake until golden.

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. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 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

Apples
Provide the bulk and tart flavour of the filling, and soften as the pie bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and draws moisture out of the apples to form a syrup.
Quince or marmalade
Adds pectin and concentrated fruit flavour that helps the filling set and hold together.
Pastry
Forms the structural case that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, lemon, clove, quince):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, lemon, clove, quince. 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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