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Dessert

Caramel Pie

A custard pie made with caramelized sugar, milk, eggs, and salt baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Caramel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Stir ¾ cup sugar in a frying pan until it turns light brown.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of hot water and mix thoroughly.

Make the custard

  1. Pour in 1 pint of hot milk and remove from heat immediately.

  2. Blend the hot sugar mixture with the milk.

  3. Pour the mixture over 3 beaten eggs.

  4. Add ¼ teaspoon salt.

Bake

  1. Pour the custard into a pie crust.

  2. Bake until a knife inserted comes out clean.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sugar
Browns in the pan to form the caramel flavour that defines the pie.
Eggs
Set the custard and give it structure as they cook in the hot milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and adds richness and softness.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to colour, and it can burn before it reaches light brown. Removing it from heat at the right colour gives caramel flavour without bitterness.

“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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