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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A baked lemon pie with a meringue topping made from bread crusts, butter, sugar, lemon juice, zest, eggs, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Break the bread into a bowl and pour the boiling water over it.

  2. Once softened, mash the bread into a pulp.

  3. Add the sugar, butter, lemon juice, lemon zest, and beaten egg yolks to the pulp.

Bake and cool

  1. Cover a pie plate with pastry, fill it with the mixture, and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  2. Let the pie cool.

Top with meringue

  1. Make meringue by beating the egg whites with ice water and enough sugar to stiffen.

  2. Spread the meringue over the cooled pie and return to the oven to 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the filling and egg whites whip into the meringue topping.
Bread
Softened and mashed, it gives the filling body and a soft, pulpy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stiffen the meringue.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and zest adds aroma to the filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the filling.

The step that matters

Beating the meringue to stiffness. Egg whites need to be beaten with sugar until they form stiff, glossy peaks. Under-beaten whites weep or slump on the pie, while the sugar stabilises the foam so the topping holds its shape when browned.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, 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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