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Dessert

Canned Pumpkin

A preserved pumpkin mixture sweetened with coffee sugar, spiced with ginger and cinnamon, and salted, canned while hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Canned Pumpkin

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Stew the pumpkin and pass it through a colander.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pint of coffee sugar.

  2. Add 1 quart of pumpkin, ginger, cinnamon, and coarse sea salt to the syrup.

Can and store

  1. Can the mixture while it is boiling hot.

  2. Before baking into pies, add eggs and milk.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Pumpkin + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,158 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Coffee + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together895 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Provides the bulk, moisture and body of the filling.
Coffee sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the syrup as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Can the mixture while it is boiling hot. Canning while boiling hot drives air out of the jar and heats the contents enough to help seal the lid and reduce spoilage. Letting the mixture cool first can leave the jar vulnerable to bacteria.

Swap the pumpkin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, sugar, ginger, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Pumpkinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar, ginger, cinnamon. 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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