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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon and apple custard pie baked in two crusts and finished with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the rind of the lemons and squeeze out the juice.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated apples, lemon juice, egg yolks, sugar, water, and flour made smooth in a little of the water.

  3. Pour the mixture into two medium-sized pie crusts.

Bake and top

  1. Bake the pies until nearly done.

  2. Whip the reserved egg whites to a froth, adding a little sugar.

  3. Spread the whipped egg whites over the top of the pies.

  4. Return the pies to the oven and bake until the tops are light brown.

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 + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Yolks thicken the filling, and whipped whites form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Apples
Grated apples provide the body and bulk of the pie filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the whites whip to a stable froth.
Lemons
Juice and rind add acidity and bright lemon aroma to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it sets rather than running when sliced.

The step that matters

Baking the filling before adding the meringue topping. Baking until nearly done sets the thickened filling first, so the topping can brown without the filling overcooking or becoming runny.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg, sugar, 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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