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Dessert

Cream Fib

A pie with a butter-sugar batter crust and a boiled milk, sugar, and egg yolk filling flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Cream Fib

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 pie crusts

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Beat in the eggs, then add the milk.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and baking powder, then sift it into the wet mixture.

  5. Divide the batter into two pie tins and bake until done.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, reserve some milk to wet the flour, then boil the remaining milk with sugar and egg yolks for three minutes.

  2. Once cooled, flavor the filling with lemon or vanilla and spread it between the baked pie crusts.

Finish

  1. If desired, ice the tops of the pies.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the crust as its proteins set during baking.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter as they set when heated.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the crusts rise.
Egg yolks
Thicken the boiled milk filling as they cook, giving it a custard body.
Milk
Provides moisture to the batter and makes up the body of the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if overheated, so the milk, sugar and yolks should be cooked gently while stirring. Wetting the flour with milk first helps prevent lumps in the thickened filling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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