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Dessert

Aunt Charlotte Pies

A custard pie made with milk, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, lemon, and nutmeg, baked without an upper crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Aunt Charlotte Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Wet the flour with cold milk before adding it to the boiling milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour while boiling until it is as thick as starch.

  3. Beat the eggs separately, then mix the yolks with the sugar.

  4. Melt the butter in the boiling milk and combine all ingredients into a batter.

  5. Stir in the beaten egg whites and flavor with lemon and nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Bake until brown.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Thickens the boiling milk into a starch-set custard base.
Eggs
Provide structure and set the custard as they cook and bake.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the lemon flavor.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set.

The step that matters

Wet the flour with cold milk before adding it to the boiling milk. Dry flour dropped into hot liquid clumps instantly because its outer layer hydrates before the starch inside. Wetting it first with cold milk disperses the starch evenly, so the custard thickens smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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