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Dessert

Maple Pie

A custard pie with maple syrup, milk, sugar, butter, flour, eggs, baked and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Maple 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 filling

  1. Combine maple syrup, whole milk, sugar, butter, and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat until thickened. Remove from heat.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks and maple flavoring.

  4. Pour the mixture into a pie crust.

Bake and top with meringue

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  2. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Spread the meringue over the baked pie.

  3. Return the pie to the oven. Bake until the meringue is lightly browned.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Maple syrup
Provides the main maple sweetness and flavor of the filling.
Whole milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the filling tender.
Flour
Thickens the filling as it cooks with the milk.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the custard as they set during baking.
Egg whites
Whipped into meringue to give a light, airy, browned topping.

The step that matters

Cook the filling until thickened. Flour thickens only when the mixture reaches a full simmer and is cooked long enough. Undercooked starch leaves a runny filling that will not set properly after baking.

“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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