Name: Baked Pie-plant
Ingredients: 2 pounds pie-plant; ½ cup sugar; 2 tablespoons flour or ½ cup rolled bread crumbs; water

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Baked Pie-plant

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

2 pounds pie-plant
½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour or ½ cup rolled bread crumbs
water

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Cut the pie-plant into a pudding dish.
Sprinkle sugar and flour (or bread crumbs) over the pie-plant.
Add water until the pie-plant is two-thirds covered.

Bake

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 to 40 minutes.

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.

Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Pie-plant: Forms the bulk of the dish and softens into a tender, cooked filling as it bakes.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the pie-plant.
Flour or rolled bread crumbs: Thickens the juices that form as the pie-plant cooks, helping it set.

“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.