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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A baked pie with sliced sweet potato, sugar, butter, cinnamon, and cream, covered by a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 539 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the sweet potato until well done.

  2. Slice the potato thinly.

  3. Prepare a pie crust and place the crust in a pie tin.

Assemble

  1. Layer the sliced potato in the crust.

  2. Cut the butter into small pieces and add the butter pieces to the potato.

  3. Mix in the sugar, cream, and cinnamon.

Bake

  1. Bake with an upper crust or without, as preferred.

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 + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together539 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 potato
Forms the bulk of the filling and sets into a soft, sliceable texture.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown slightly during baking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the filling a smoother mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, helping the filling set into a creamy custard-like texture.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm aroma and flavour to the sweet potato.

The step that matters

Cook the sweet potato until well done. Starch in the potato only softens fully when cooked through. A firm or undercooked slice stays hard in the oven and will not blend into a smooth, tender filling.

“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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