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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A pie made with sliced sweet potatoes, sugar, cloves, butter, lemon juice, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 228 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil, skin, and slice the sweet potatoes crosswise.

  2. Line a pie dish with the pie crust.

Assemble

  1. Layer the sliced potatoes in the dish and sprinkle generously with sugar.

  2. Scatter the whole cloves over the potatoes and add more slices on top.

  3. Add the melted butter, a little water, and the lemon juice.

  4. Cover with puff pastry and bake until golden.

Serve

  1. Serve cold.

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 + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sweet potato + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

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 the pie its soft, starchy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the potatoes caramelise lightly as they bake.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and keeping the filling moist.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden top layer over the filling as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. The puff pastry needs enough heat to set and brown fully. Underbaked pastry stays pale and soggy, while the filling needs time to cook through and set.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

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