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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard-style pie with a meringue topping made from flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix flour and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add egg yolks and enough milk to moisten, stirring until smooth.

  3. Boil the pint of milk in a saucepan.

  4. Set the dish in hot water to prevent burning.

  5. Stir in the egg and flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  6. Add a pinch of salt and the butter, and flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Assemble and bake

  1. Bake your pie crust.

  2. Fill the crust with the cream mixture.

  3. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks.

  4. Add the tablespoon of sugar.

  5. Spread the meringue over the pie.

  6. Brown the meringue in the oven.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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 yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness and colour.
Flour
Thickens the custard so it sets into a smooth, sliceable filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps stabilise the meringue.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that thickens when heated.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that forms the meringue topping.

The step that matters

Stir the egg and flour mixture into the boiling milk. Starch in the flour only thickens fully when heated, and egg yolks can curdle or scramble if they meet very hot milk too fast. Stir steadily and keep the custard moving so it thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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