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Dessert

Silver Pie

A sweet potato pie with lemon, sugar, egg whites, rose water, and currant jelly garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rose and currant work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 494 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Silver Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the potato into a deep plate.

  2. Add lemon juice, lemon rind, beaten egg white, sugar, and cold water to the potato.

  3. Pour the mixture into the pie shell and bake until done.

Top and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites, powdered sugar, and rose water until well combined.

  2. Spread the egg white mixture evenly on top of the pie and return to the oven for a few moments to stiffen.

  3. Serve cold, garnished with a spoonful of currant jelly on each piece if desired.

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. Rose + curranttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White potato
Grated potato gives the filling its body and thickens it as it bakes.
Egg white
Beaten egg whites in the filling help bind and set the custard-like layer.
Egg whites
Beaten and spread on top, they form a meringue that stiffens in the oven.
White sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily into the beaten whites, sweetening and stabilising the meringue topping.
Lemon
Juice and rind add acidity and aroma that cut through the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stiffening the meringue topping. Egg whites must be beaten until well combined and then baked only briefly; overbaking can make the topping weep or brown too much, while underbaking leaves it soft.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, egg, sugar, rose, currant):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg, sugar, rose, currant. 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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