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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon pie with a buttery crust, lemon custard, and meringue topping.

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

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cream butter and sugar together in a bowl.

Make the filling

  1. Add sweet milk, egg yolks, flour, lemon juice, and grated rind; mix well.

  2. Combine water and corn starch in a small pot; stir until smooth.

  3. Place pot in boiling water and cook until thickened.

Bake and finish

  1. Line pie plate with puff pastry and bake until lightly browned.

  2. Pour lemon mixture into baked crust.

  3. Beat egg whites until stiff, gradually adding sugar, then spread over pie.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 to the lemon custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the water mixture as it cooks, giving the filling body.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness to the creamed base.
Egg whites
Beaten with sugar to form a stiff meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Lemon
Provides the sour, aromatic lemon flavour of the filling.

The step that matters

Cook the corn starch mixture until thickened. Starch only thickens fully once it has reached a boil and gelatinised; undercooked starch leaves the filling thin and runny, while overcooking can break down its thickening power.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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