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Dessert

Swbet Potato Custard

A custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, steamed potatoes, butter, and cinnamon baked in a pie crust.

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 ↓

Swbet Potato Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks until light.

  2. Add milk and sugar to the yolks.

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

  4. Season with cinnamon and butter.

Bake and brown

  1. Pour into a pie crust and bake.

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

  3. Return to the oven to brown.

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
Yolks thicken the custard as they set, and whites whip into a meringue topping.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that sets into a creamy custard when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the meringue stay glossy.
Steamed potatoes
Adds body and thickness, making the custard smoother and heavier.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Return to the oven to brown. Meringue can go from golden to scorched in a short time. Watch it closely, because high heat sets and darkens the sugar-protein surface quickly, and overbrowning gives a bitter taste.

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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