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Dessert

Lemon Cream Pie

A lemon custard pie baked in a crust, topped with sweetened meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,927 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cream 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 filling

  1. Dissolve corn starch in cold water.

  2. Stir corn starch into boiling water.

  3. Add butter and sugar, beaten together, to the mixture.

  4. When cool, add lemon juice, lemon rind, and beaten yolks of the eggs.

  5. Pour into an open pie crust and bake until set.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, sweeten, and spread over the top.

  2. Brown the pie in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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 + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  2. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the boiled liquid into a smooth, sliceable custard filling.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the filling; whites whip into a stable, browned meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the whipped egg white topping.
Lemon
Juice supplies sharp acidity and the rind adds aromatic lemon flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Stir corn starch into boiling water. Starch only thickens properly when it is dispersed in liquid before heating. Pre-dissolving it in cold water prevents lumps, and the mixture must stay at a boil so the starch gelatinises and thickens evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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