Skip to main content
Dessert

Oeeam Pie

A pie with a buttery batter and a sweet milk‑flour filling flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Oeeam 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 crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the eggs and mix well.

  4. Stir in the milk.

  5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking powder, then sift into the mixture.

  6. Divide the batter between two greased pie tins and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 1 pint of milk.

  2. Take out enough milk to wet ½ cup of flour, then mix it with the boiled milk.

  3. Add ⅔ cup sugar and the egg yolks, stirring continuously until it thickens.

  4. Boil for 3 minutes, then let it cool.

  5. Flavor the filling with lemon or vanilla extract.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the baked pie crusts.

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. 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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crust batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as it sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crusts and thickens the filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the crusts rise and turn light.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as it cooks and add richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the crusts and filling and helps them brown.

The step that matters

Stirring the filling until it thickens. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the hot milk mixture is overheated or stirred too little. Constant stirring keeps the heat even so the starch and yolks thicken it smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More oatmeal pie recipes

Apple 3 See all 2 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes