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Dessert

Strawberry Pie

A pie with a crust filled with a walnut and sugar mixture, topped with frothy egg white and sugar, optionally with strawberries and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry 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 filling

  1. Line a pie plate with the pastry crust.

  2. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks, sugar, walnut, and flour until smooth.

  3. Pour the mixture into the crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy, then add sugar and spread over the baked pie.

  2. Brown the topping under the broiler for a few minutes.

Lemon version

  1. For the lemon version, sprinkle the crust with sugar and flour, fill with strawberries, and add lemon slices before baking.

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. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 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).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 give it a rich, set custard-like texture when baked.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that forms a light topping which browns under the broiler.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the whipped egg white topping stay stable.
Flour
Adds body to the filling so it holds its shape when cut.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright flavor to balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until frothy. Egg whites must be whipped to a stable foam before sugar is added; under-whipped or greasy whites will not hold a peak and the topping can weep or flatten under the broiler.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, lemon. 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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