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Dessert

Lemon Pie with Two Crusts

A lemon pie made with a lemon juice and rind mixture, sugar, butter, egg, flour, raisins, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pie with Two Crusts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice and rind, sugar, butter, egg, flour, and chopped raisins.

  2. Beat the mixture thoroughly.

  3. Pour in the boiling water just before placing it in the crust.

Bake

  1. Bake immediately.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Walnut + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Binds the filling and helps it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it holds its body rather than running loose.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice and rind
Provides acidity and aroma that give the filling its bright flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling water just before placing it in the crust. The boiling water begins to thin and dissolve the starch and sugar, so the filling must go into the crust and into the oven right away. Waiting lets the mixture thicken unevenly before baking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, walnut, butter, egg, flour, raisin. 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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