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Dessert

Kentish Pie

A custard pie made with milk, rice flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and topped with currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Kentish 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 rice milk

  1. Bring 2 cups of milk to a boil in a double boiler.

  2. Sprinkle in 1 ounce of rice flour, 1 ounce of butter, and 2 ounces of sugar; cook for about 10 minutes.

Fill and bake

  1. Remove from heat and stir in 1 ounce of butter, 2 ounces of sugar, a pinch of salt, a pinch of nutmeg, a few drops of lemon essence, and 2 beaten eggs.

  2. Fill pastry-lined patty pans with the mixture and sprinkle a few currants on top.

  3. Bake for about 20 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy filling.
Rice flour
Thickens the hot milk into a smooth, spoonable custard.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the filling its firm, sliceable structure.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps give it a golden surface.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten eggs off the heat. Adding eggs to very hot liquid can scramble them into lumps. Removing the pan from the heat first lets the eggs blend smoothly and set evenly in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, flour, butter, sugar, nutmeg, 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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