Skip to main content
Dessert

Dedham Cream Pie

A lemon custard pie with a baked crust and sugared meringue topping.

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 ↓

Dedham Cream 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.

Prepare the custard

  1. Prepare a pie crust and bake it until lightly golden.

  2. In a saucepan, combine milk, flour, sugar, egg yolks, salt, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  3. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened into a custard.

  4. Pour the custard into the baked pie crust.

Top and bake

  1. In a bowl, beat egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add 1 cup of sugar to make icing.

  2. Spread the icing over the top of the pie.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until the icing is browned.

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that sets when thickened.
Flour
Thickens the custard by swelling with liquid as it heats.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the custard as their proteins set with heat.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and icing and helps the icing brown.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing a light, airy structure.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet custard.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard over medium heat while stirring constantly. Flour starch and egg yolk proteins thicken the custard only as they heat, and the mixture can scorch or turn lumpy if left unstirred. Constant stirring keeps heat even so it thickens smoothly.

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.

You might also like

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