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Dessert

Cherry Cobbler

A baked dessert of shortcake dough filled with cherries and served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Cobbler

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the cobblers

  1. Make a rich shortcake dough and roll it thin.

  2. Cut the dough into pieces the size of a saucer.

  3. Place 2 heaping tablespoons of cherries in the center of each piece.

  4. Pinch the crust together to seal.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine water, sugar, and flour.

  2. Add butter and mix well.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the cobblers in the pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Serve with the juice as a sauce.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

All-purpose flour
Provides structure to the shortcake dough and thickens the juices into a sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the shortcake crust tender and rich.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and sauce and helps the crust brown.
Canned cherries
Supply the fruit filling and its juice, which becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Pinch the crust together to seal. A tight seal keeps the cherry juices inside the dough while baking. Gaps let the filling leak and can leave the crust soggy and the sauce thin.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter. 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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