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Dessert

Corn Starch Pie

A custard pie made with corn starch, milk, sugar, egg, vanilla, and baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Corn Starch Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Mix the corn starch with a little milk to make a smooth paste.

  3. Stir the corn starch mixture into the heated milk.

  4. Add the sugar, beaten egg yolk, salt, and vanilla, and mix well.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake the pie crust alone until golden.

  2. Pour the filling into the baked crust.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg white with 2 tablespoons sugar until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread the meringue over the filling and brown lightly in the oven.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable custard filling as it heats.
Egg
Adds richness and helps set the custard; the white is whipped for the meringue topping.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue whip and hold its peaks.

The step that matters

Stir the corn starch paste into the hot milk. Corn starch thickens only when heated, and lumps form if it is added as dry powder. Mixing it first into a smooth paste with cool milk lets the starch disperse evenly, so the custard thickens without clumps.

“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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