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Dessert

Ceeam Pie

A pie with a butter‑sugar crust and a milk‑egg filling flavored with lemon or vanilla.

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 crusts

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in the milk, flour, and baking powder until combined.

  4. Divide the mixture into 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, then add ⅔ cup sugar and the egg yolks.

  3. Stir the filling mixture and boil for 3 minutes.

  4. Once cooled, flavor with lemon or vanilla and spread between the 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure to the crusts.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as it boils and give it a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Provides the structure for the crusts and thickens the filling when cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the crusts rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the crust batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the crusts and filling and helps them brown.

The step that matters

Boiling the filling. Egg yolks thicken only when heated enough, but overheating or boiling too long can curdle them. Stir constantly and watch the texture so the filling sets smooth rather than grainy.

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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