Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Pie

A fruit pie with sliced oranges and apples, sweetened with sugar and butter, topped with nutmeg and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Line a pie dish with rich pastry.

  2. Layer sliced oranges and apples in the dish.

  3. Sprinkle white sugar over the fruit.

  4. Sprinkle melted butter over the fruit.

  5. Add more oranges and apples until the dish is full.

  6. Grate a little nutmeg over the top.

  7. Cover the pie with pastry.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) until done.

  2. Sprinkle 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. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  2. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 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

Sliced apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and moisture that softens during baking.
Sliced oranges
Add juicy, acidic flavour that brightens the sweet filling.
White sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juices as it bakes.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the filling.
Rich pastry for pie crust
Forms the enclosing shell that holds the fruit and juices together.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, apple, 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes