Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Meringue Pie

A pie with a lemon custard filling topped with meringue.

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

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Meringue Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil 1 cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, and water.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of cornstarch moistened with cold water and cook for five minutes.

  3. Stir in the yolks of 2 eggs, lemon juice, lemon rind, and salt.

  4. Cool slightly and pour the mixture into a pre-baked pie crust.

Top and bake

  1. Cover with meringue made from 2 tablespoons of sugar and brown in the 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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Cornstarch
Thickens the lemon filling as it cooks, giving it a sliceable set.
Eggs
Egg yolks enrich the filling and help it set into a smooth custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the meringue topping.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the filling and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook the cornstarch mixture for the full five minutes. Cornstarch thickens only when its starch granules swell and gelatinise at a boil. Undercooking leaves the filling thin and runny, so it will not set properly when cooled.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

You might also like

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