Name: Cocoanut Custard Pie
Ingredients: puff pastry for pie crust; shredded coconut; custard (prepared with vanilla)

Why it works: Coconut and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,294 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Cocoanut Custard Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

puff pastry for pie crust
shredded coconut
custard (prepared with vanilla)

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Assemble

Line pie plates with puff pastry.
Add a handful of shredded coconut to each pie plate.
Fill with custard flavored with vanilla.

Bake

Bake for 20 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Coconut + vanillatop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,294 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry: Forms the crisp, flaky crust that holds the custard filling.
Shredded coconut: Adds chewy texture and toasty coconut flavor to the filling.
Custard: Sets during baking to form the creamy body of the pie.

“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.