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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A baked pie with a pumpkin custard filling made from mashed pumpkin, milk, eggs, sugar, spices, and pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pumpkin Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. Stew the pumpkin in a covered pot until soft enough to mash.

  2. Press the mashed pumpkin through a sieve into a basin.

  3. Add milk to the pumpkin to make a thin batter.

  4. Stir in the beaten eggs, sugar, salt, grated nutmeg, lemon extract, and ground ginger if desired.

Bake and serve

  1. Line pie dishes with pie crust and fill them with the pumpkin mixture.

  2. Trim the edges of the crust and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes until the top is delicately brown.

  3. Decorate the pie as desired.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  4. Pumpkin + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,158 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pumpkin + nutmegtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Provides the bulk, moisture and body of the filling.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the filling its firm, custard-like structure.
Milk
Thins the pumpkin into a pourable batter and adds richness and softness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the earthy flavour of the pumpkin.

The step that matters

Baking the filled pie. The egg proteins set as the filling heats, so the pie must bake until just set. Overbaking can make the custard weep, crack or turn grainy.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pumpkin, milk, egg, sugar, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pumpkin, milk, egg, sugar, 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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