Name: Pumpkin Pies
Ingredients: 4 cups stewed pumpkin; 2 quarts milk; 8 eggs; 2 cups white sugar; 2 teaspoons mixed mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon; Flour for dusting pie plates

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pumpkin Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Beat the yolks of the eggs until light and mix in the sugar.
Press the pumpkin through a colander and stir in the egg and sugar mixture.
Add the milk and spices, then fold in the whipped egg whites.
Flour the pie plates and line them with pie crust, cutting slashes in the crust to prevent puffing.
Stir the pumpkin custard well before pouring it into the prepared pie plates.
Do not use a top crust.

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.

Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Pumpkin + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,744 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,341 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pumpkin, milk, egg, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, flour):

Cardamomfits better
Allspicefits better
Clovefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pumpkin, milk, egg, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.