Skip to main content
Main

Potato Pie

A baked dish of grated potatoes, milk, butter, eggs, and spices in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Grate the potatoes and stir them into the hot milk.

  3. Add the butter to the mixture while it is still hot.

  4. Allow the mixture to cool.

  5. Add the beaten eggs.

  6. Spice and sweeten to your taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the filling into a pie crust and bake.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the starchy body that thickens the filling into a soft, sliceable custard.
Eggs
Set the filling as they cook, binding it into a firm custard.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the filling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the potatoes and eggs set within.

The step that matters

Add the eggs after the mixture has cooled. Eggs scrambled by hot mixture turn grainy instead of blending smoothly. Cooling the filling first lets the eggs mix in evenly and set into a smooth custard when baked.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, egg, sugar. 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 potato pie recipes

Sweet 114Irish 16Crust 10Lemon 7Southern Sweet 5 See all 98 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes