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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A baked pie made with cooked pumpkin, eggs, milk, spices, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 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.

Prepare the filling

  1. Select a deep yellow, fine-grained pumpkin, pare it, and cook slowly.

  2. Pass the cooked pumpkin through a colander to obtain 3 pints.

  3. In a large bowl, combine the pumpkin, beaten eggs, milk, mace, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, ginger, and salt, and beat all ingredients together until well mixed.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake at 350 °F (175 °C) until golden brown.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Provides the bulk, body and flavour of the filling.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the custard its structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, helping the custard stay tender.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses note, and helps with browning.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown, not longer. Eggs set as they heat, and overbaking pushes them past that point, causing the custard to crack, weep or turn grainy. Pull the pie once the centre has just stopped jiggling.

Swap the mace

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

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

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