Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Cream Pie

A lemon custard filling baked in a pie crust, topped with a stiffened egg white and powdered sugar mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Zest the lemon, removing the white pith, and chop the remaining lemon finely.

  2. In a bowl, stir cornstarch into boiling water until dissolved, then boil.

  3. Add white sugar and a pinch of salt to the mixture and let it cool.

  4. Once cooled, mix in the beaten yolks of two eggs.

Bake and finish

  1. Prepare a rich paste and bake it in a pie crust.

  2. When the pie is cool, top it with beaten egg whites mixed with powdered sugar until stiff.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemon
Adds tart acidity and bright citrus aroma that balance the sweetness of the filling.
Cornstarch
Thickens the boiled liquid so the filling sets into a firm, sliceable cream.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and add richness, color and body as they set.
White sugar
Sweetens the filling and offsets the sharpness of the lemon.
Egg whites
Whipped with powdered sugar, they form a light, stable meringue topping.
Pie crust
Holds the filling in shape and gives the pie its base structure.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff before topping the pie. Whites whipped with sugar form a stable foam only when fully beaten to stiff peaks. Underbeaten whites collapse or weep, and spreading them onto a warm filling can cause beads of liquid to form.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes