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Dessert

Strawberry Cream Pie

A pie with a pastry crust filled with sweetened strawberries and a custard made from milk, egg whites, sugar, and cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the pie

  1. Line a pie dish with pastry and fill it with sweetened fresh strawberries.

  2. Cover with pastry, leaving the edges unpinched.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk (or cream) to boiling.

  2. Beat the egg whites and stir them lightly into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the sugar and cornstarch mixed with a little milk, then stir and cook for three minutes.

  4. Pour the mixture over the strawberries and replace the top crust.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle sugar over the top before serving.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Egg whites
Set and thicken the milk mixture into a soft custard as they cook.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture so it holds its shape when cooled.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and adds richness.
Fresh strawberries
Provide the fruit filling and their own sweet, tart flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg whites into the boiling milk. Adding the beaten whites to very hot milk while stirring lightly helps them set into soft strands rather than scrambling. Cooking the mixture a few minutes afterward thickens it fully through starch.

“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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