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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with raisins, sugar, flour, butter, and a pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Juice the lemon and grate the rind.

  2. In a saucepan, combine lemon juice, grated rind, sugar, flour, and butter.

  3. Cook over medium heat until thick, then stir in the raisins.

Assemble the pie

  1. Prepare a pie crust and pour the filling into it.

  2. Roll out a thin pastry for the top and cover the pie.

  3. Alternatively, make a roll instead of a pie and serve with lemon sauce.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Flour
Thickens the lemon juice mixture as it cooks into a set filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the filling.
Lemon
Provides the sour, aromatic flavour of the filling through juice and rind.
Seeded raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the lemon filling.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat until thick. Flour thickens only when the mixture is heated enough for its starch to swell. Cooking gently and stirring prevents scorching and lumps, and the filling sets properly as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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