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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon custard pie with butter, sugar, eggs, and sweet milk baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the zest from the lemons and squeeze the juice separately.

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, and lemon zest.

  3. Add the sweet milk and lemon juice to the mixture.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and fold them into the mixture.

  5. Finally, fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the filling into pie crusts and bake.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to add richness and a tender texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps cream with the butter to trap air.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the filling and whites, folded in, add lightness and structure.
Lemon juice
Adds the sharp acidity that gives the pie its tangy flavour.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and body, softening the filling and balancing the lemon's tartness.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the whites' trapped air intact, which keeps the filling light. Stirring or deflating them makes the pie dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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