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Dessert

Lemon Cream Pie

A custard pie made with eggs, lemon juice and rind, sugar, water, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs.

  2. In a bowl, mix the yolks, lemon juice, lemon rind, 6 tablespoons of sugar, and water. Beat the mixture until light.

  3. Cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until it thickens into a custard.

  4. Remove from heat and fold in part of the beaten egg whites mixed with the remaining 3 tablespoons of sugar.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the custard into a dish or onto a pie crust as desired.

  2. Spread the remaining meringue on top and brown it 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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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 custard while whites are whipped into the meringue for lightness.
Lemon
Juice provides the sharp acidity and rind adds fragrant lemon aroma.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and meringue and helps stabilise the beaten egg whites.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard in a double boiler. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if they get too hot they scramble into lumps. Gentle, constant stirring over simmering water keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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