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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with a buttery crust, lemon custard filling, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, salt, lard, and water to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough and place it in a pie dish.

  4. Bake the crust until brown.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine lemon rind, lemon juice, butter, sugar, and cornstarch.

  2. Cook the mixture until smooth.

  3. Remove the mixture from heat.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Stir in the egg yolks.

  6. Pour the filling into the baked crust.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Add sugar to the beaten egg whites.

  3. Spread the meringue over the filling.

  4. Return the pie to the oven.

  5. Brown the meringue.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the crust together while baking.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the crust short and tender.
Cornstarch
Thickens the lemon juice and sugar mixture into a smooth, sliceable filling.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the filling, giving it body and a rich color.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam to form the meringue that sets and browns on top.
Lemon juice
Provides the acidity that gives the filling its bright, tart flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the filling until smooth before adding the egg yolks. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture is cooked to a boil, and the starch must be fully gelatinized before cooling. Adding yolks to a hot mixture without tempering can scramble them, so the filling should be cooled before the yolks are stirred in.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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