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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A baked pie made from sweet potatoes, eggs, sweet milk, sugar, salt, lemon, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 314 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Scrape and clean the sweet potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  3. Rub the boiled potatoes through a colander.

  4. Beat the yolks of the eggs until light.

  5. Stir the egg yolks into the potatoes with the sweet milk.

  6. Add sugar, salt, and lemon flavoring.

Bake and top

  1. Bake until the top is a nice brown.

  2. Make a meringue with the egg whites and powdered sugar.

  3. Top the pie with meringue and brown it briefly in the oven.

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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Form the body of the filling, giving it a soft, smooth, thick texture.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the filling, while whites whip into the meringue topping.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and liquid so the mashed potato becomes a pourable custard-like filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it hold a stable, glossy structure.

The step that matters

Rub the boiled potatoes through a colander. Pushing the potatoes through a colander breaks down fibres and lumps, producing a smooth filling rather than a stringy or grainy one.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

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

More sweet potato pie recipes

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