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Dessert

Watermelon Pie

A pie made with watermelon, lemon, sugar, cornstarch, and nut paste crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Watermelon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the watermelon

  1. Cut the watermelon in half and remove the red part.

  2. Remove the outer skin and cut the red part into small pieces.

  3. Cook the pieces in plenty of water until very tender.

Make the filling

  1. Add lemon juice, grated lemon rind, sugar, and vanilla.

  2. Mix cornstarch with a little cold water until smooth, then add to the mixture.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour into a pie tin lined with nut paste.

  2. Cover with a second crust and bake.

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).

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

Watermelon
Forms the main body of the filling, providing its juice and soft texture once cooked.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the filling.
Grated lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oils that flavour the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the lemon's tartness.
Cornstarch
Thickens the filling as it heats, turning the juices into a sliceable set.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture thickens. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the liquid is heated to a boil. If it is stopped early, the filling stays runny and may soften the crust after baking.

“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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