Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Pies

Two baked cake layers made with eggs, sugar and flour are split and filled with a milk and egg cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Cream Pies

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 cakes

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, ½ teaspoon baking soda, and 1 cup flour until well combined.

  3. Divide the batter into two pans and bake until golden.

Make the cream filling

  1. In a saucepan, bring 1 pint of milk to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 4 eggs, 1 cup sugar, and 1 tablespoon flour.

  3. Pour the egg mixture into the boiling milk, stirring constantly until thickened.

  4. Remove from heat, let cool, and flavor with vanilla.

Assemble

  1. Once the cakes are cold, split each cake in half.

  2. Fill the split cakes with the cream mixture.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Walnut + coffeetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the cream filling and add structure to the cakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.
Flour
Provides structure to the cakes and thickens the cream filling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and the cream filling.

The step that matters

Pour the egg mixture into the boiling milk, stirring constantly until thickened. Eggs can scramble if they hit hot liquid too fast or sit unstirred. Constant stirring spreads the heat and lets the flour and egg proteins thicken the custard smoothly.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter, cream, coffee, flour, milk. 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.

More cream pie recipes

Lemon 54Boston 44Sour 38Coconut 24Whipped 20Orange 18 See all 378 →

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesCoffee Ice CreamCoffee Ice Cream91 recipesCoffee CustardCoffee Custard27 recipesCoffee CakeCoffee Cake21 recipes