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Dessert

Pieplant Pie

A pie made with chopped pieplant, sugar, flour, eggs, butter, lemon juice, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pieplant 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 the pieplant

  1. Boil water, then pour the boiling water over the chopped pieplant and let it boil for a moment.

  2. Drain the pieplant well.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the drained pieplant, sugar, flour, egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice, and mix the filling well.

  2. Pour the filling into a pie crust.

Make the meringue and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Spread the stiff egg whites over the filling to create a meringue.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until the meringue is 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. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pieplant
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives the pie its tart flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart pieplant and adds body to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the juices released by the pieplant so the filling holds together.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they set and add richness.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they form the airy structure of the meringue topping.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and sharpens the pieplant flavour.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Whipping traps air in the egg white proteins, creating a foam that holds its shape and bakes into a stable meringue. Underbeaten whites weep and collapse, while overbeaten whites turn grainy and dry.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, egg, butter, 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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