Name: Excellent Pumpkin Pie
Ingredients: pumpkins; allspice; cinnamon; vinegar; water; sugar; plain pie crust

Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Excellent Pumpkin Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Pare and slice the pumpkins as for apple pie.
Place them in an earthen jar and add allspice, cinnamon, and enough vinegar to cook them.
If the vinegar is too strong, dilute it with water.
Cover the jar closely and set it on the back of the stove to stew for several hours.
Before placing the mixture into the crust, add sufficient sugar to taste.
Bake with a top crust.

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.

Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Pumpkin + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,744 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Pumpkin + allspicetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together259 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Allspice + vinegartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,548 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

Cinnamon and sugar 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

Swap the pumpkin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (allspice, cinnamon, vinegar, sugar):

Vanillafits better
Orangefits better
Figfits better
Pumpkinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against allspice, cinnamon, vinegar, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.