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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A baked pie with pumpkin, eggs, spices, sugar, salt, and milk in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pumpkin 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pare the pumpkin and stew it in just enough water to cover.

  2. Mash the pumpkin through a sieve.

  3. In a bowl, combine the pumpkin, eggs, mace, cinnamon, and ginger. Mix well and add sugar and coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Thin the mixture with a little milk.

Bake

  1. Pour into a deep pie plate lined with pie crust.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pumpkin + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Provides the bulk and body of the filling, along with moisture and flavor.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the filling its firm, sliceable structure.
Milk
Loosens the mixture and adds richness and softness to the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the spices.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture with a little milk. Too much milk makes the filling watery and prevents it from setting firmly. Adding it gradually lets you reach a pourable consistency that still bakes into a sliceable custard.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

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