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Dessert

Potato Pie

A baked pie filled with mashed potatoes, marrow, butter, eggs, almonds, dates, lemon, and candied peel, topped with crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Potato 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Butter a shallow pie dish generously.

  3. Line the edges of the dish with pie crust.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the pie with mashed potatoes, seasoned with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Add marrow, small lumps of butter, chopped hard-boiled eggs, blanched almonds, sliced dates, sliced lemon, and candied peel on top.

  3. Cover the dish with another pie crust.

  4. Bake the pie for 30 to 60 minutes, depending on the size.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Almond + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 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

Mashed potatoes
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives it a soft, moist body.
Marrow
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a soft, savoury filling.
Hard-boiled eggs
Set when heated, giving the filling body and structure.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.
Dates
Add sweetness and a chewy texture to the filling.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, potato, pepper, nutmeg, egg, almond, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, potato, pepper, nutmeg, egg, almond, 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.

More potato pie recipes

Sweet 114Irish 16Crust 10Lemon 7Southern Sweet 5 See all 98 →

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