Name: Sweet Potatoe Pie
Ingredients: large sweet potatoes; flour; 2 tablespoons vinegar; 1 teaspoon butter; ½ cup water; sugar to taste; nutmeg or allspice to taste

Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoe Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Steam the sweet potatoes until soft.
Slice them thin.
Prepare the pastry as usual.

Assemble and bake

Lay the sliced potatoes in a deep pie pan.
Sprinkle flour over the potatoes.
Add vinegar, butter, and water.
Sprinkle sugar and nutmeg or allspice to taste.
Bake until warm.
Serve.

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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together414 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together627 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Sweet potatoes: Form the bulk of the filling and give it a soft, tender body when cooked.
Flour: Thickens the juices released by the potatoes so the filling sets rather than running.
Vinegar: Adds a sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the potatoes and sugar.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel in the baked filling.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to the filling, adjusted to taste.

Swap the sweet potato

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

Shallotfits better
Arrowrootfits about as well
Mustardfits about as well
Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, vinegar, butter, sugar, 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.