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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A baked pie made from sweet potato, milk, eggs, sugar, seasoning, and pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and milk work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 596 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then peel and strain through a colander.

  2. Add milk until the mixture is thin enough.

  3. For every quart of the mixture, add 3 well-beaten eggs, along with sugar and seasoning to taste.

Bake

  1. Line the bottom of a pie plate with the crust, fill it with the mixture, and bake.

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. Sweet potato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together596 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sweet potatoes
Provide the bulk of the filling and its smooth, starchy body once mashed.
Eggs
Set the filling as it bakes, giving it a firm, sliceable structure.
Milk
Thins the mashed sweet potato to a pourable consistency and adds richness.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually. Too much liquid makes the filling watery and prevents it from setting firmly, so add milk only until the mixture is thin enough to pour, checking as you go.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar. 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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