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Dessert

Walnut Pie

A custard pie with milk, eggs, sugar, walnuts, and butter baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Walnut 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 filling

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

  2. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  3. In a bowl, combine the scalded milk, 2 egg yolks, sugar, and butter.

  4. Chop and sift the walnuts, then add to the mixture.

Bake and top

  1. Pour the filling into a pie crust and bake slowly until set.

  2. Once cool, beat the egg white and add a little sugar.

  3. Spread the egg white mixture over the pie and sprinkle with walnut meat.

  4. Brown the topping in the oven before serving.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + walnuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg yolks set into a custard.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the filling as it sets, and whipped whites form the light topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the whipped egg whites hold their shape.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender filling.
Walnuts
Add nutty flavour and texture to both the filling and the topping.

The step that matters

Bake the filling slowly until set. Egg proteins set gently at moderate heat. Too much heat can make the custard curdle, weep, or turn rubbery, so check for a just-set centre rather than a hard one.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Cocoafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, meat, butter. 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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