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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon custard pie with a baked crust and frothy egg white topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Combine lemon juice, lemon rind, boiling water, egg yolks, corn starch, flour, and sugar in a custard kettle.

  2. Boil until the mixture thickens.

  3. Pour the filling into the pie crust.

Bake and top

  1. Bake the pie.

  2. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  3. Spread the froth over the pie.

  4. Place in the oven for a few minutes to brown slightly.

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. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness as they set with the heat.
Corn starch
Thickens the filling as it boils, giving a smooth, sliceable body.
Egg whites
Beaten to a stiff froth, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Provides the tart, acidic flavour that defines the pie.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture thickens. The starch must be fully boiled to gelatinize and set the filling. Undercooked starch leaves the filling thin, while the egg yolks also need to reach a boil to thicken fully without weeping later.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, corn, flour, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, corn, flour, 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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