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Dessert

Eemon Pie

A lemon pie with a buttery crust, lemon custard filling, and baked meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Eemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Line a pie tin with rich pastry.

  2. Bake the lined tin until golden.

Make the lemon filling

  1. Mix sugar, cornstarch, and egg yolks together, adding cold water if necessary.

  2. Boil water with butter, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Add the sugar, cornstarch, and egg mixture.

  4. Cook the mixture until thickened.

  5. Fill the baked crust with the lemon mixture.

Top with meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites with powdered sugar.

  2. Bake the meringue in the oven until browned.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they set with heat, giving it a rich, custard-like body.
Cornstarch
Thickens the lemon mixture as it cooks, giving it a smooth, sliceable texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with powdered sugar to form a light meringue that browns in the oven.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that gives the filling its characteristic tang.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the acidity of the lemon.

The step that matters

Cook the filling until thickened. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture reaches a boil and is stirred, and undercooked starch leaves the filling runny. Egg yolks in the mix also need to be heated enough to thicken without scrambling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, 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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