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Dessert

Old-fashioned Plum Pie

A traditional plum pie with a puff pastry crust and sugared plum filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Old-fashioned Plum Pie

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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Seed the ripe plums and place them in a deep pie plate lined with puff pastry.

Assemble and bake

  1. Sprinkle a thick layer of sugar over each layer of plums.

  2. Add spices if desired.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of water and sprinkle a little flour over the top.

  4. Cover with a thick crust and bake for 50 to 60 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Plum + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 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

Ripe plums
Provide the main fruit filling, supplying juice and tart-sweet flavor as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and draws out juice from the plums as it sits and cooks.
Flour
Sprinkled over the filling to thicken the juices as the pie bakes.
Rich puff pastry
Forms the buttery, flaky lining and top crust that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Sprinkling flour over the filling. Flour must be spread evenly over the juicy plums so it can thicken the liquid during baking. Clumps or too little flour can leave a runny or pasty filling.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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