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Potato Pie

A baked pie filled with mashed potatoes, marrow, eggs, almonds, dates, lemon, and candied peel, topped with pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Butter a shallow pie dish generously.

  2. Line the edges with the pie crust.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the pie with mashed potatoes, seasoned with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Add marrow, small lumps of butter, chopped hard-boiled eggs, blanched almonds, sliced dates, sliced lemon, and candied peel on top.

  3. Cover the dish with pastry.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes or longer, depending on the size of the 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Almond + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 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

Mashed potatoes
Forms the soft, bulky filling that makes up most of the pie.
Marrow
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a moist, savoury body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add set, firm bits of protein that give the filling more substance.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the filling taste rounded and moist.
Blanched almonds
Add crunch and a nutty flavour that contrasts with the soft filling.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, potato, pepper, nutmeg, egg, almond, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, potato, pepper, nutmeg, egg, almond, lemon. 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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