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Dessert

Chess Pie

A sugar, butter and egg filling with walnuts and raisins, baked in pie crust and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Chess 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.

Make the filling

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Mix in the chopped walnuts, raisins, whole egg, egg yolks, and vanilla.

Bake the tarts

  1. Line gem pans with the rich pie crust.

  2. Fill each crust with the filling and bake until brown at 350°F (175°C).

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  4. Gradually add the sugar to the beaten egg whites.

  5. Spread the meringue on the pies and brown in the oven.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Walnut + vanillatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,730 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Raisin + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together782 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Walnut + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the filling a tender, rich texture.
Egg yolks
Bind the filling and add richness and set when baked.
Whole egg
Helps bind the filling and adds structure as it sets.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a stable meringue that browns on top.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and stabilizes the beaten egg white meringue.

The step that matters

Spread the meringue on the pies and brown in the oven. Meringue made from whites and sugar can weep or deflate if under-beaten or left too long before baking. Spreading it fully to the crust edge seals the filling and helps the top brown evenly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, raisin, egg, vanilla):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, raisin, egg, vanilla. 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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