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Dessert

Pumpkin Pie

A custard pie made with cooked pumpkin, eggs, milk, sugar, spices, and a rich crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Prepare the filling

  1. Press the cooked pumpkin through a sieve.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar together until thick.

  3. Add the milk to the beaten egg yolks.

  4. Mix in the pressed pumpkin, cinnamon, mace, and grated nutmeg.

  5. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a rich pie crust and bake without a cover.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and whites, beaten stiff and folded in, lighten the filling.
Cooked pumpkin
Provides the bulk, moisture and flavour of the filling.
Milk
Adds liquid that, with the eggs, sets into a smooth custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the yolks thicken when beaten.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only while stiff; overmixing or letting them deflate loses the lift and lightness the filling depends on.

Swap the mace

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

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

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