Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Meringue Pie

A pie with lemon custard filling topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Meringue Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Grate 1 lemon and add the juice of another lemon.

  2. Beat the yolks of 3 eggs and sweeten to taste.

  3. Stir in 2 cups of milk with 2 tablespoons of flour dissolved in it until smooth. Add the milk mixture to the lemon, stirring continuously until mixed.

Bake the pie

  1. Dust a little flour over the bottom of the pie crust, pour in the mixture, and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set. Remove from the oven and cool for a few minutes.

Make and add the meringue

  1. Beat the whites of 3 eggs to a stiff froth, then add 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar and beat together. Spread the meringue over the top of the lemon filling and bake quickly at 400°F (200°C) until 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 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 milk.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the filling holds its shape when sliced.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the filling.
Milk
Forms the body of the custard filling with the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Baking the meringue quickly. Meringue sugar and whites can weep or shrink if baked too long, while brief high heat sets and browns the surface before the filling and foam deflate.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes