Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A baked pie with sweet potato filling, sweet preserves, sugar, butter, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, topped with pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 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. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel and slice them thin.

  3. In a bowl, combine the sliced sweet potatoes with sweet preserves, sugar, butter, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie dish.

  2. Cover with a pie crust.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbly.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Sweet potato + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  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
Provide the bulk and starchy body that thickens and sets the filling as it bakes.
Sweet preserves
Add sweetness, fruit flavor and moisture to the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust and filling brown.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, tender texture.

The step that matters

Bake until the filling is bubbly. The starch in the sweet potatoes needs sustained heat to thicken and set. A pie pulled from the oven early will stay runny and may weep or slump when sliced.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, clove, allspice, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatothe original
  4. Arrowrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, clove, allspice, 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.

More sweet potato pie recipes

Southern 5 See all 114 →

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesSweet Corn PuddingSweet Corn Pudding8 recipes