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Dessert

Orange Cream Pie

A custard pie with orange flavor topped with meringue.

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

Orange Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Beat egg yolks with ½ cup sugar until well combined.

  2. Add flour, cornstarch, and salt; mix until smooth.

  3. Pour mixture into boiling milk and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Remove from heat, let cool, and stir in orange extract.

  5. Pour filling into the baked pie crust.

Top and brown

  1. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gradually add ½ cup sugar and 1 teaspoon orange extract, mixing until glossy.

  3. Spread meringue over the pie filling and lightly brown 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. 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. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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 and add richness to the filling.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping.
Cornstarch
Thickens the filling as it cooks in the hot milk.
Flour
Adds extra thickening to help the filling set smoothly.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilize the meringue.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling in boiling milk. Starch granules only thicken fully once the mixture reaches a boil, so stir constantly to prevent lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the orange

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

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

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