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Dessert

Fig Pie

A pie filled with figs cooked with sugar and water, flavored with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 763 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fig Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a pot, combine figs, sugar, and water.

  2. Squeeze the juice of the lemon into the mixture and add the lemon rind.

  3. Boil the mixture until it thickens.

Assemble

  1. Use the filling to make four pies.

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. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

  2. Fig + sugartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

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

Figs
Provide the main fruit flavour and body that thickens into the pie filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the boiling figs, helps the filling thicken into a spreadable mixture.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet fig flavour, and its rind adds aroma.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens. Figs and sugar must be cooked long enough for the liquid to reduce and the fruit pectin to set. Stopping early leaves a runny filling that soaks the pastry, while overcooking makes it stiff and sticky.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fig, sugar. 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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