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Dessert

Custard Pie

Custard pie is a baked pastry filled with a sweet custard made from eggs, milk, sugar, and flour, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Custard 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. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, mix egg yolks, sugar, and flour until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the scalded milk to the egg mixture, stirring constantly.

Prepare the crust

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

Assemble and finish

  1. Pour the custard filling into the baked crust.

  2. Beat the egg whites until frothy, then gradually add 3 tablespoons of sugar until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread the meringue over the custard and bake until golden.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set and add richness and colour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs set into a creamy custard.
Flour
Stabilises the custard so it thickens smoothly and holds its shape when cut.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the whipped egg whites hold stiff peaks.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that forms the meringue topping and browns when baked.

The step that matters

Gradually add the scalded milk to the egg mixture, stirring constantly. Adding hot milk too fast can scramble the egg yolks, leaving lumps. Adding it slowly while stirring gently warms the yolks so the custard thickens evenly and smoothly.

“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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