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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with a meringue topping made from lemon zest, juice, sugar, eggs, flour, and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the lemon zest and juice it.

  2. Pour boiling water over the lemon and let it cool.

  3. In a bowl, beat the sugar with the egg yolks.

  4. Add the cooled lemon mixture and flour to the egg yolk mixture.

Bake the pie

  1. Pour the filling into a pie crust and bake until light brown.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then sweeten with sugar.

  2. Spread the meringue over the baked pie and brown lightly.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that gives the meringue its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pie and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.
Lemon
Provides acidity and bright lemon aroma that balances the sweetness.
Flour
Thickens the lemon filling so it holds its body when cut.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Whites must be whipped to firm peaks without overbeating. Sugar stabilises the foam, but overbeaten whites turn dry and grainy and can weep liquid onto the pie.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, 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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