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Irish Potato Pie

A baked potato pie made with grated potatoes, milk, eggs, butter, sweet wine, spices, and sugar.

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 ↓

Irish Potato 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. Boil the potatoes until tender, then let them cool.

  2. Grate the cooled potatoes into a bowl.

Make the filling

  1. Add the milk, eggs, butter, sweet wine, cinnamon or nutmeg, and sugar to the grated potatoes.

  2. Mix all ingredients until well combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set and golden.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Potatoes
Provide the starchy bulk that gives the pie its body and sliceable texture.
Eggs
Set the custard-like filling as they cook, holding the pie together.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the potato and helping the filling set smoothly.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the baked filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and aids gentle browning on the surface of the pie.

The step that matters

Bake until set and golden. Eggs thicken as they heat, so the pie must be baked just until set. Overbaking can make the custard grainy, weepy, or rubbery.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, wine, cinnamon, sugar. 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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