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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard pie made with sweet milk, eggs, sugar, flour, butter, and a baked crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

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 custard

  1. Boil the sweet milk.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with ⅓ cup of sugar and flour until well combined.

  3. Stir the yolk mixture into the boiling milk, then add the butter.

Bake the crust

  1. Prick the pie crust to prevent blistering.

  2. Bake the pie crust at 350°F (175°C).

Fill and top

  1. Pour the custard into the baked crust.

  2. Return the pie to the oven for a few moments.

  3. Beat the egg whites to a froth with the remaining sugar.

  4. Spread the beaten egg whites on top of the pie and brown slightly.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they set; whites whip into a froth for the topping.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the yolks thicken.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped egg white topping.
Flour
Thickens the custard and helps it hold its shape when cut.
Butter
Adds richness, softness and a rounder flavour to the custard.

The step that matters

Stir the yolk mixture into the boiling milk. Egg yolks begin to set around 70°C and can scramble into lumps if they meet very hot liquid too quickly. Adding the yolks gradually while stirring constantly keeps the custard smooth.

“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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