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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie with One Crust

A pie made from boiled sweet potatoes layered in a crust, sweetened with sugar, flavored with nutmeg, and baked with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 Potato Pie with One Crust

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. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Line a pie dish with pie crust.

Assemble

  1. Slice the potatoes and cover the bottom of the crust.

  2. Sprinkle the sliced potatoes with sugar, a light dusting of flour, and a pinch of salt.

  3. Add another layer of sliced potatoes and dot with butter.

  4. Fill the dish with milk.

  5. Flavor the dish with nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until set.

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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 body and natural sweetness as they soften.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard-like filling brown slightly at the surface.
Flour
Thickens the liquid slightly so the filling sets smoothly rather than watery.
Milk
Provides liquid that sets with heat into a custard around the potatoes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the top layer and aids browning.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Pull the pie when the center is just firm and no longer liquid. Overbaking can make the milk-based custard curdle or weep, while underbaking leaves the filling runny.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatothe original
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits less well

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

More sweet potato pie recipes

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