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Dessert

Saveet Potato Custard

A custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, steamed potatoes, butter, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Saveet Potato Custard

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 custard

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat the egg yolks until light, then add the milk and sugar.

  3. Press the steamed potatoes through a sieve and stir into the custard until thick.

  4. Season with cinnamon and add the butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust.

  2. Make a meringue with the egg whites and spread it over the top.

  3. Return to the oven and bake until the meringue is browned.

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. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard, and whites whip into the meringue topping.
Potatoes
Mashed steamed potatoes give the custard body and a thick, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the meringue brown in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that sets with the egg into a custard.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the custard.

The step that matters

Stir the potatoes into the custard until thick. The custard thickens as the egg proteins set with gentle heat. Adding the potatoes to a hot or boiling mixture can curdle the eggs, so the custard should be stirred over gentle heat only until it coats a spoon.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, butter, 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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