Skip to main content
Main

Potato Pie

A baked dish of mashed potatoes mixed with milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and spices, encased in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until well done, then mash and sieve them.

  2. Prepare a rich pastry for the under crust.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the potato pulp with sweet milk, melted butter, sugar, eggs, salt, and flavoring. Mix well until smooth.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pastry 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Provide the bulk and body of the filling, giving it a soft, custard-like texture.
Eggs
Set the filling as it bakes, giving it structure and firmness.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and liquid that bakes into the smooth, creamy body of the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly at the surface.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing a smoother mouthfeel to the filling.

The step that matters

Mix the filling until smooth. Mashed potatoes left lumpy or unsieved will bake with a grainy texture. Sieving and thoroughly mixing the potato with the milk and eggs keeps the filling smooth and evenly set.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg. 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 potato pie recipes

Sweet 114Irish 16Crust 10Lemon 7Southern Sweet 5 See all 98 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes