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Dessert

Canned Peach Meringue Pie

A pie made with canned peaches, a sugar‑corn starch custard, and a meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and corn share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 94 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Canned Peach Meringue Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Wet the corn starch with a little of the water.

  2. Beat the yolks of the eggs lightly with the sugar and add to the corn starch.

  3. Place the rest of the water in a pot and bring to a boil.

  4. Stir in the corn starch mixture, which will thicken immediately.

  5. Add the butter, salt, sugar, and peach juice.

  6. Cook for 2 minutes and remove from heat.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a pie plate with pastry and cover the bottom with a layer of canned peaches.

  2. Pour the cooked mixture over the peaches and bake.

  3. Spread the beaten egg whites sweetened with 1 teaspoon of sugar over the top and brown lightly.

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. Peach + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together94 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Peach + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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

Corn starch
Thickens the filling as it heats, swelling and setting the liquid into a smooth custard.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and help thicken the filling, while whites whip into a foam for the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and meringue, and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.
Canned peaches
Provide the fruit flavour and moisture that the filling sits on and blends with.
Peach juice
Adds liquid and concentrated peach flavour to the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a softer, rounder mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stir the corn starch mixture into the boiling water. Starch granules thicken the liquid as they heat and swell. If the mixture is added unevenly or the liquid is not kept moving, clumps form and the filling sets lumpy rather than smooth.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, corn, butter, 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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