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Dessert

Strawberry Cream Pie

A baked pie with a butter-sugar-egg crust, strawberry cream filling, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 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 ↓

Strawberry Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cake

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat in the whole egg and the egg yolk until light.

  3. Sift together the flour, corn starch, and baking powder.

  4. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk to the butter mixture.

  5. Bake in two round layer cake pans at 350°F (175°C).

Make the cream filling

  1. For the cream filling, mix corn starch with cold milk.

  2. Add scalded milk to the mixture.

  3. Cook over hot water for 20 minutes. Stir frequently after it thickens.

  4. Add sugar, salt, butter, lemon extract, and the beaten egg to the filling. Remove from heat. Beat well.

  5. Cool before spreading on the cake.

Make the meringue and assemble

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Gradually add powdered sugar. Add lemon juice. Beat well.

  2. Spread the meringue over the top of the pie.

  3. Drop in strawberries to half conceal them.

  4. Serve the pie as soon as possible after preparation.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and custard, and add structure and richness to the cake and filling.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake crumb as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake and filling.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream filling as it cooks with the milk.
Milk
Provides moisture and helps form the cake batter and the custard filling.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they form the light, airy meringue topping.

The step that matters

Cook the cream filling over hot water. Starch only thickens fully when the mixture is heated enough to gelatinize it, and stirring prevents lumps and scorching. Removing from heat and cooling before spreading lets the filling set firmly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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