Skip to main content
Dessert

Pie Plant Pie

A pie made from sliced pie plant with sugar, butter, and flour, baked until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Slice the pie plant into rounds.

  2. Make a good pie crust.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the flour with the sugar and add the pie plant.

  2. Sprinkle additional sugar and flour over the pie plant.

Bake

  1. Bake with the upper crust in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until the pie plant is cooked and juices are extracted.

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
Provides the tart flavor and the bulk of the filling, releasing juices as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and draws moisture out of the pie plant to form syrup.
Flour
Thickens the released juices so the filling holds together when cut.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with the sugar before adding the pie plant. Flour clumps when added directly to wet fruit. Blending it with sugar first spreads it evenly, so it thickens the juices throughout instead of leaving pockets of dry flour or thin spots.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes