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Dessert

Summer Squash Pie

A pie filled with cooked summer squash, sugar, vanilla, and cornstarch, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Summer Squash Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cook the summer squash until tender.

  2. Pass the squash through a sieve or colander.

  3. Mix in sugar, salt, vanilla, and cornstarch to thicken.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust.

  2. Bake until the crust is golden brown.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Summer squash
Provides the main body and bulk of the filling once cooked and pureed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the squash's mild flavor.
Cornstarch
Thickens the squash mixture so it sets rather than running out of the crust.

The step that matters

Passing the squash through a sieve or colander. Cooked squash holds excess water and fibrous bits; straining removes them so the filling is smooth and thickens properly instead of turning watery or grainy.

“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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