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Old Jersey Style Pumpkin Butter

A sweet pumpkin spread made by cooking pumpkin with sugar, cinnamon, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Old Jersey Style Pumpkin Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Peel and clean the pumpkins, then cut them into small pieces.

  2. Boil the pumpkin pieces in water until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Pass the cooked pumpkin through a pulping machine.

Make the butter

  1. In a jacketed kettle, combine 100 gallons of pumpkin pulp with 50 lbs of sugar, ½ lb of ground cinnamon, and ¼ lb of ground ginger.

  2. Cook the mixture until it thickens enough to stand while hot.

  3. Pass the thickened mixture through a finishing machine.

  4. Optionally, add a few sliced lemons to improve the flavor.

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 + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Pumpkin + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,158 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkins
Provides the bulk of the pulp, which cooks down into a thick, smooth butter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the butter as it cooks down.
Ground cinnamon
Adds warm spice aroma and flavor to the butter.
Ground ginger
Adds aromatic warmth and a gentle spicy bite.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until it thickens enough to stand while hot. Pumpkin holds a lot of water, and cooking drives off moisture and concentrates the sugar. Stopping too early leaves a thin butter that runs, while overcooking can scorch the sugars on the bottom of the kettle.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pumpkin, sugar, cinnamon, ginger):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pumpkin, sugar, cinnamon, ginger. 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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