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Dessert

Chestnut Pie

A baked pie with chestnuts, peanut milk, egg, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chestnut 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. Make the peanut milk by dissolving the peanut butter in water and cooking it in a double boiler for one hour.

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

  3. Beat the egg in a bowl.

Make the filling

  1. Add the chestnuts, peanut milk, sugar, and salt to the beaten egg and mix well.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Chestnut + peanuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Peanut + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,048 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the filling and helps it set into a firm custard when baked.
Chestnuts
Provide the body and starchy, mild bulk of the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling set smoothly.
Peanut milk
Supplies liquid and a nutty flavour that carries the custard.

The step that matters

Baking until set. Egg proteins coagulate as the filling heats, so the pie must bake until just set; overbaking can make it curdle, weep and turn rubbery.

Swap the chestnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peanut, milk, egg, sugar, 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.

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