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Dessert

Pumpkin or Squash Pie

A custard-like pie made with mashed pumpkin, sugar, ginger, flour, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pumpkin and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,158 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pumpkin or Squash Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Drain the cooked pumpkin until dry, then mash it until smooth.

  2. Mix in the sugar, ginger, and salt.

  3. In a bowl, gradually mix the flour with the milk until free from lumps.

  4. Stir the flour mixture well into the pumpkin.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake in the oven like a custard pie.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pumpkin + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Pumpkin
Provides the main body and flavor of the filling once mashed smooth and dry.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it sets firmly rather than staying loose.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and with the egg-free base helps the filling set as a custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly during baking.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with the milk. Flour clumps if added dry or too quickly, and lumps stay in the filling. Mixing it into the milk gradually first lets each grain hydrate evenly, so the thickener works smoothly throughout the pumpkin.

Swap the pumpkin

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, milk, 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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