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Dessert

Cream Pie

A cake with a creamy filling made from eggs, sugar, corn starch, milk, butter, sour cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Beat 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons corn starch together.

  2. Boil 1 pint milk and season with vanilla.

  3. Just as the milk boils, stir in the egg mixture continuously until it thickens.

  4. Before cooking, stir in 1 tablespoon butter for the pie filling.

Make and bake the cake

  1. For the cake, beat 3 eggs with 1 cup sugar and ¼ teaspoon baking soda in ½ cup sour cream.

  2. Mix in 1 teaspoon cream of tartar and 1½ cups flour.

  3. Bake quickly in jelly cake pans.

Assemble

  1. When cold, slice the cake and layer it with the cream filling.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Set the custard as they heat and give the cake structure as they bind the batter.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, sliceable cream filling as it heats.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream filling, which thickens when heated with the eggs and starch.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake once it sets in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour cream and cream of tartar to lift the cake.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity to the cake batter, tenderising the crumb and helping it rise.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Stir continuously as it thickens. Constant stirring spreads the heat so the eggs do not curdle or scorch, and the starch thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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.

More cream pie recipes

Lemon 54Boston 44Sour 38Coconut 24Whipped 20Orange 18 See all 378 →

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