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Dessert

Sweet Potato Custard Pie

A custard pie made with mashed sweet potato, sweet milk, eggs, sugar, butter, and nutmeg or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter. Mix the creamed mixture with the mashed sweet potatoes.

  3. Add the sweet milk, egg yolks, and flavor with nutmeg or cinnamon.

  4. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth and gently stir them into the mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the filling into a pie pan lined with crust.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until set.

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. Sweet potato + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 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. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potato
Provides the bulk and body of the custard filling.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set when baked.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they lighten the filling and add structure.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and liquid that the eggs set into a custard.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stir the whites in gently so the air whipped into them is not lost. Deflated whites make a denser pie that rises less and sets less lightly.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Leekfits less well

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