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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard pie made with milk, eggs, sugar, flour, butter, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 filling

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thin.

  3. Add the flour, wetting it with a little milk.

  4. Stir the mixture into the heated milk.

  5. Beat the mixture well.

  6. Add the egg mixture and the butter.

  7. Cook for about 5 minutes until thick.

Bake and top

  1. Bake the pie crust until golden.

  2. Add the filling to the crust.

  3. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks form.

  4. Spread the meringue on top of the pie.

  5. 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the custard so it holds its shape when cut.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer filling texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the whipped meringue.

The step that matters

Cook the filling until thick. Egg yolks and flour thicken as the starch swells and the yolk proteins set with heat. Stop too early and the filling stays runny; cook too long or too hot and the yolks can curdle.

“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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