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Dessert

Custard for Lemon Pie

A custard made with lemon, sugar, corn starch, eggs, and water for filling a pie.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,927 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Custard for Lemon Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix sugar and corn starch in a bowl.

  2. Add eggs and mix well.

  3. Grate lemon rind and add lemon juice to the mixture.

  4. Work the mixture into a paste.

  5. Gradually mix in water until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the custard into a pie crust and bake slowly.

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

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard as it heats, giving it a smooth, sliceable body.
Eggs
Set with gentle heat to give the custard structure and richness.
Lemons
Juice adds tartness and rind adds a fragrant lemon aroma.

The step that matters

Bake slowly. Eggs set gently at moderate heat. If the oven is too hot, the proteins tighten too fast, so the custard can curdle, weep liquid, or turn grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, corn, egg. 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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