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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A baked pie with a pumpkin filling made from cooked pumpkin, sugar, flour, spices, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pumpkin 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 the filling

  1. Beat the egg in a bowl.

  2. Add sugar, flour, cooked pumpkin, ginger, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg; mix well.

  3. Incorporate the butter and enough hot milk to make the mixture total 3 cups.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the pie crust.

  2. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven until the center is firm, about 45 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pumpkin + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Sets the custard as it cooks, giving the filling structure and body.
Pumpkin
Provides the bulk, moisture and flavor base of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it set to a smooth texture.
Milk
Adds liquid and richness, thinning the mixture to a pourable custard.
Flour
Thickens the filling slightly so it holds its shape when sliced.

The step that matters

Bake until the center is firm. Egg proteins set gradually as the custard heats. Pulling the pie too late can leave it cracked or weeping, while overbaking can make it grainy or curdled, so the center should be just set and still slightly wobbly.

Swap the pumpkin

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Pumpkinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, 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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