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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie made with milk, flour, lemon rind and juice, sugar, eggs, baked and topped with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Line a pie plate with a rich crust.

Make the filling

  1. In a double boiler, boil milk and flour for 3 minutes.

  2. Grate the lemon rind and squeeze the juice, then add to the mixture with sugar and egg yolks. Beat well.

  3. Stir in the milk and flour mixture, then pour into the pie plate.

Bake and brown

  1. Bake for 15 minutes.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add granulated sugar and spread on the pie.

  3. 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. Milk + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness as they set with the lemon.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Flour
Thickens the boiled milk into a smooth base for the filling.
Lemon
Provides the acidity and aroma of the filling from rind and juice.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue stay stiff and brown.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Whites must be whipped until they hold firm peaks before sugar is added; under-whipped whites will weep and deflate. Sugar added gradually helps stabilise the foam.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, 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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