Name: Rhubarb Pies
Ingredients: young rhubarb stalks, cut into ½ inch pieces; ½ cup sugar; pie crust

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb Pies

Ingredients

young rhubarb stalks, cut into ½ inch pieces
½ cup sugar
pie crust

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

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Make a pie crust and cover the bottom of your pie plate.

Fill and bake

Add the cut rhubarb pieces to the pie plate.
Sprinkle ½ cup of sugar over the rhubarb.
Cover with another layer of pie crust.
Bake until the fruit is soft.

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.

Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,852 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb: Provides the tart fruit filling that gives the pie its main flavour and bulk.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart rhubarb and helps draw out its juices as it bakes.

“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.