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Dessert

Orange Pie

A custard pie made with orange juice, zest, lemon juice, zest, eggs, butter, sugar, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange 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. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat in the juice and grated rind of the orange and the juice and grated peel of the lemon.

  3. Whip the mixture lightly and add the beaten yolks of the eggs.

Bake and top with meringue

  1. Fill two pie dishes lined with puff pastry with the mixture and bake at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Once baked, whip the egg whites until stiff, adding 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar.

  3. Spread the meringue on top of the pies and return to the oven for a few minutes to bake the meringue.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the citrus filling, while whites whip into the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, with the butter, is creamed to start the mixture.
Butter
Creamed with the sugar to give the filling richness and a smooth texture.
Orange juice
Provides the main citrus flavour and acidity in the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten yolks to the filling. Yolks thicken the filling as they set in the oven. Adding them to a very hot or over-whipped mixture can cause uneven setting, so keep the mixture cool and whip only lightly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, lemon, 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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