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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard pie made with milk, flour, sugar, egg yolks, lemon, and frosted with beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Bake a pie crust until lightly golden.

  2. Boil 1 pint of milk in a saucepan.

  3. While boiling, stir in ½ cup of flour and 1 cup of sugar.

  4. Beat 2 egg yolks and add them to the mixture.

  5. Stir in the juice and grated rind of 1 lemon.

  6. Pour the filling into the baked crust.

Top and brown

  1. Beat 2 egg whites until stiff.

  2. Frost the top of the pie with the stiff egg whites.

  3. Brown the pie lightly 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the boiled milk into a sliceable custard as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and help it set into a creamy custard.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the topping and browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the lemon's tartness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and sugar while the milk boils. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid and needs constant stirring so it disperses without lumps. Adding it to cold milk or stopping the stirring can leave lumps or a thin filling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, sugar, egg. 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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