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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie

A custard pie made with mashed sweet potatoes, eggs, milk, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

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 the filling

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then mash them finely.

  2. Add salt and butter to the mashed potatoes.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs until light.

  4. Combine the beaten eggs with the mashed potatoes and enough sweet milk to create a custard-like consistency.

  5. Sweeten the mixture to taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set, similar to pumpkin custard.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Sweet potato + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together70 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sweet potato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together596 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Walnut + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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 of the filling and its sweet, starchy body once mashed.
Eggs
Set the mixture into a sliceable custard as they cook.
Sweet milk
Loosens the mashed potato into a custard-like consistency.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the filling.

The step that matters

Baking until set. Eggs thicken as they heat, so the pie must be baked until the centre is set. Underbaking leaves a runny filling, while overbaking can make the custard weep or crack.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, butter, egg, milk, 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.

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