Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Pie with Two Crusts

A lemon pie made with a lemon filling, raisins, and baked in two crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pie with Two Crusts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Grate the whole lemon.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated lemon, sugar, butter, egg, flour, and chopped raisins.

  3. Beat thoroughly.

  4. Pour in the boiling water just before placing the mixture in the crust.

Bake

  1. Bake immediately.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Walnut + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Binds the filling and helps it set as it bakes.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it holds its body while baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Provides the main tart, aromatic flavour from its zest and juice.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the filling's texture.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling water just before placing the mixture in the crust. Adding the boiling water late keeps the mixture from thinning or cooking unevenly before it reaches the oven. Baking it immediately after preserves that structure and helps the filling set properly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, walnut, butter, egg, flour, raisin. 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.

More lemon pie recipes

Filling 23Apple 11Raisin 4 See all 602 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes