Name: Sweet Potato Pie
Ingredients: boiled sweet potatoes; pastry for pie; ½ cup sugar; ⅓ cup wine; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon mace; whole raisins

Why it works: Sweet potato and raisin share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Slice the boiled sweet potatoes thinly.
Line a dish with pastry and layer the sweet potato slices inside.
In a bowl, mix sugar, wine, butter, and mace to create a rich sauce.
Pour the sauce over the sweet potatoes.
Strew whole raisins on top.

Bake

Cover with a crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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.

Sweet potato + raisintop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together19 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,151 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled sweet potatoes: Forms the soft, starchy body of the filling.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded texture.
Wine: Adds acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the sauce.
Whole raisins: Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bits scattered through the pie.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, sugar, wine, butter, raisin):

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegfits better
Gingerfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, sugar, wine, butter, raisin. 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.