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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A baked pie made with boiled sweet potatoes, sugar, butter, eggs, nutmeg, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

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

Make the filling

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the mashed sweet potatoes and mix well.

  3. Beat the yolks of the eggs and add to the mixture.

  4. Whip the whites of 4 eggs until stiff and fold into the mixture.

  5. Flavor with nutmeg and lemon.

Bake

  1. Pour 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. Sweet potato + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Sweet potato + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the main body and moisture of the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps tenderize the custard texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender texture.
Eggs
Yolks bind and set the filling; whipped whites add lightness.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped whites. Whites must be whipped until stiff and folded gently so air is kept in the mixture. Overmixing deflates the foam, leaving a denser pie that may not rise or set evenly.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatothe original
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

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