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Dessert

Apple Custard Pie

A pie with a custard filling made from apples, sugar, butter, nutmeg, salt, cornstarch, milk, eggs, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Apple Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Pare, core, and cook the apples until soft.

  2. Mash the cooked apples with a fork.

  3. Add sugar, butter, nutmeg, salt, and cornstarch mixed with a little milk to the apples.

  4. Beat the yolks of the eggs in a cup. Add enough milk to fill the cup.

  5. Pour the mixture over the apples.

  6. Mix everything well and cook on the stove until combined.

Bake and top

  1. Line a pie tin with the crust. Bake the crust until golden.

  2. Pour the custard mixture into the baked crust.

  3. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks form. Spread the meringue over the pie.

  4. Brown the meringue in the oven.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and their pectin and acidity help the filling set and taste fresh.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they set, while whites whip into the meringue topping.
Cornstarch
Starch thickens the milk and apple mixture as it cooks, giving a sliceable filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue whip into a stable, glossy foam.
Milk
Adds liquid and richness to the custard, which thickens with the eggs and starch.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling on the stove. Cornstarch and egg yolks only thicken once the mixture reaches a simmer and stays there briefly. Undercooked, the custard stays runny and may not set after baking.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, nutmeg, milk, 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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