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Dessert

Two-crust Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with two crusts, filled with lemon slices, sugar, and a lemon‑flour custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Two-crust Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust and lemons

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Line your pie dish with the pie crust.

  3. Roll the lemons to soften them, then grate the rind of the lemons.

  4. Cut the lemons into thin slices and remove the seeds.

  5. Spread a layer of lemon slices evenly over the crust and sprinkle 1 cup of sugar on top.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, mix 4 tablespoons of flour with cold water to make a paste.

  2. Add boiling water to the paste while stirring, cooking for a few moments until thickened.

  3. Add a pinch of salt and the grated lemon rind to the thickened mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture over the sugar and lemon slices in the pie crust.

Bake

  1. Cover with another crust, cutting slits in it to let out the air.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 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

Flour
Thickens the cooked filling into a paste that holds the lemon juice and sugar together.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharp acidity of the lemon.
Lemons
Provide the main flavour, acidity, and the aromatic oils in the rind.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Thickening the flour paste. Flour must be stirred into cold water first and then into boiling water while stirring constantly, so the starch dissolves evenly and thickens without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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