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Dessert

Ceeam Pie

A sweet pie with a butter, sugar, and flour crust and a milk and egg yolk filling.

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

Ceeam 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 the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the eggs and mix well.

  4. Stir in the milk.

  5. Sift the flour with baking powder and add to the mixture.

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

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, take 1 pint of milk and reserve some to wet ½ cup of flour.

  2. Boil the remaining milk with ⅔ cup sugar and the egg yolks.

  3. Stir the mixture and boil for 3 minutes.

  4. Once cooled, flavor with lemon or vanilla.

  5. 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
Creams with sugar to give the crust a tender, rich texture and fat for flavor.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the crust rises and becomes lighter.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they heat and add richness and body.
Milk
Provides moisture in the batter and forms the base of the custard filling.

The step that matters

Boil the filling mixture. Egg yolks thicken the filling only when heated enough to set, but overheating can curdle them. Stirring keeps the heat even so the custard thickens smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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