Skip to main content
Bread

Corn-flour Fruit Pie

A fruit pie made with corn flour and milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Corn-flour Fruit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Bake or stew the fruit with sugar until soft.

  2. Place the fruit in a pie dish.

Make and bake the topping

  1. Boil the corn flour with the milk in a saucepan, stirring until thickened.

  2. Pour the corn flour mixture over the fruit in the pie dish.

  3. Brown the pie under a broiler or in a hot oven 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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. 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

Fruit
Provides the main filling and its flavor, and softens when cooked with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps it soften as it cooks.
Corn flour
Thickens the milk into a custard-like layer that sets as it cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the corn flour thickens into a creamy layer.

The step that matters

Thickening the corn flour mixture. Corn flour must be stirred while it boils with the milk, or it can clump and lumps will not smooth out. Stirring until it thickens gives an even, smooth layer that sets properly over the fruit.

“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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes