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Dessert

Pie-plant Pie

A pie made with pie-plant fruit, sugar, flour, lemon rind, lemon juice, egg yolks, and optional orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pie-plant Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Layer the filling

  1. Mix ½ cup sugar and 1 heaping tablespoon flour together.

  2. Sprinkle the mixture over the bottom crust.

  3. Add the cut pie-plant and sprinkle with another ½ cup sugar and 1 heaping tablespoon flour.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 45 minutes.

  2. Alternatively, stew the pie-plant, sweeten, and add lemon rind, juice, and egg yolks.

  3. Bake and frost like lemon 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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Pie-plant
Provides the tart fruit filling and most of the moisture in the pie.
White sugar
Sweetens the tart pie-plant and helps balance its sourness.
Flour
Thickens the juices released by the pie-plant so the filling holds together.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set when the alternative method is used.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the filling.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, lemon, egg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

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