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Dessert

Cream Pie

A baked dessert made with milk, cornstarch, eggs, sugar, butter, lemon, flour, baking powder, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the cream filling

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix cornstarch with a little milk.

  3. Add the eggs.

  4. Stir in the cornstarch mixture slowly.

  5. Add sugar, butter, and lemon juice to the mixture. Stir well.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs.

  2. Mix the beaten eggs with sugar, flour, and baking powder.

  3. Add cold water to the batter.

  4. Mix until smooth.

Bake and assemble

  1. Pour the batter into two pie pans.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  3. Split the cakes while hot.

  4. Spread the cream filling between them.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the baked cake layers together.
Eggs
Set during baking and add structure and richness to both the cake and filling.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, sliceable cream filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake layers rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the filling richness and a tender mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the cake tender and golden in color.

The step that matters

Stir in the cornstarch mixture slowly. Cornstarch clumps when it meets hot liquid unless it is well dispersed first. Adding it slowly while stirring lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the milk into a smooth filling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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