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Dessert

Potato Custard Pie

A sweet custard pie made with boiled potatoes, sugar, butter, eggs, lemon, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potato Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Boil the potatoes until tender, then rub them through a sieve.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the potato, lemon juice, and grated nutmeg to the butter mixture.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and fold them into the mixture.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then gently fold them into the potato mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a pie pan with the pie crust and dust with flour.

  2. Pour the filling into the crust and bake until set, similar to a pumpkin pie.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 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

Potatoes
Cooked and sieved, they give the custard body and a smooth, thick texture.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender, fine crumb to the filling.
Eggs
Yolks thicken and set the custard while whipped whites lighten its texture.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens the filling and helps give it a smooth structure.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the custard.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites beaten to stiff peaks trap air that lightens the filling, and overmixing or stirring vigorously deflates them, leaving a denser pie. Fold gently so the air stays in and the custard can set evenly when baked.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, lemon, 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.

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