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Dessert

Orange Pie

A fruit pie with orange juice, rind, flour, milk, eggs, and a meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Orange Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Extract the juice and grate the rind of the orange.

  2. In a bowl, combine the orange juice, grated rind, sugar, and beaten egg yolks.

  3. Blend the flour with a little cold milk, then add to the mixture along with the rest of the milk.

Bake and top

  1. Pour the filling into the pastry crust and bake until set.

  2. Make a meringue with the egg whites, sugar, and orange flavoring, then spread it over the pie.

  3. Return the pie to the oven to brown the meringue.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Yolks thicken the filling as it sets, and whites whip into the meringue topping.
Flour
Starch thickens the milk and juice mixture so the filling sets smoothly.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue whip and hold its structure.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the custard-style filling.
Orange
Supplies juice for acidity and grated rind for citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Bake the filling until set. Egg and starch must be heated enough to thicken the filling, but overbaking can make it weep or curdle. Watch for the centre to firm without bubbling hard.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, milk, 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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