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Dessert

Pie Plant Pie

A pie made with sliced pie plant, sugar, butter, and flour, baked in a double crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pie Plant Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pie plant

  1. Pour boiling water over the sliced pie plant.

  2. Let it stand for 10 minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Drain off the water and place the pie plant in the pie crust.

  2. Bake with two crusts.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pie plant
Supplies the tart flavour and the bulk of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart pie plant and balances its sourness.
Flour
Thickens the juices released as the filling bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling.

The step that matters

Drain off the water. Pie plant releases a lot of liquid as it cooks. Draining off the water after its short soak removes excess moisture, which helps keep the filling from turning watery in the crust.

“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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