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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with a meringue topping made from lemon juice, zest, sugar, milk, cornstarch, butter, egg yolks, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Bake the lemons for a short time, then squeeze and strain the juice.

  2. Boil the lemon rind in ½ cup of water.

  3. Combine the boiled water with 2 cups of sugar, ½ cup of sweet milk, 1 tablespoon of corn starch, 1 tablespoon of butter, and 6 egg yolks.

Bake and top

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake.

  2. Beat the egg whites with 8 tablespoons of sugar and pour over the pie.

  3. Brown the meringue slightly.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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 during baking.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon filling so it holds a clean, sliceable set.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sourness of the lemon.
Lemons
Provide the acidic, bright flavour of the filling.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form the meringue topping that browns on top.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue. Meringue made with whipped egg whites and sugar can weep or collapse if undercooked or overbaked. Browning it briefly sets the foam and gives colour without drying the filling beneath.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, corn, butter, 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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