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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A custard pie made with pumpkin, eggs, milk, sugar, ginger, and salt, baked in a puff pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pumpkin and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,158 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Cut the pumpkin and remove the seeds.

  2. Place the pumpkin in a pot with a little water and stew until soft.

  3. Drain the water and strain the pumpkin through a sieve while hot.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the strained pumpkin with eggs, salt, ginger, and sugar.

  2. Gradually add milk until the mixture is smooth and yellow; adjust the amount as needed.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the filling into a prepared puff pastry crust.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until set and 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. Pumpkin + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,158 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pumpkin + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Eggs
Set the filling into a firm custard as they cook and bind it together.
Pumpkin
Provides the main body, bulk and flavour of the filling.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the mixture to a smooth, pourable texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and supports gentle browning of the crust and filling.

The step that matters

Straining the hot pumpkin. Removing fibres and excess water gives a smooth, dense filling; wet or stringy pumpkin can make the custard loose or grainy after baking.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Allspicefits less well

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