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Dessert

Sweet-potato Pie

A baked pie with sweet potato layers, puff pastry crust, allspice, cinnamon, sugar, butter, lemon, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet-potato 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

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes and slice them thin.

Assemble the pie

  1. Layer the sliced potatoes in a pan with puff pastry crust.

  2. Season each layer with allspice, cinnamon, sugar, and butter.

  3. Add thin slices of lemon between each layer of potatoes.

  4. Add enough water to keep the pie moist while baking.

  5. Cover the top with puff pastry and bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Sweet potato + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together539 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  5. Sweet potato + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the bulk of the filling and soften into a tender, moist layer as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the spices and helps the filling taste rounded.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the potato slices caramelize slightly at the edges.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet filling and balances its sugar.
Puff pastry
Forms the crust that bakes into flaky, golden layers over and under the filling.

The step that matters

Adding enough water. Sweet potatoes can dry out or scorch in a hot oven. Enough liquid keeps the filling moist while the starch softens, so the slices cook through evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, allspice, cinnamon, sugar, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, allspice, cinnamon, sugar, butter. 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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