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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard filling made with milk, butter, egg yolks, sugar, flour, and flavoring, baked in a pie crust and topped with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Heat the milk and butter in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar, flour, and flavoring until light.

  3. Stir in the cold milk, then pour the mixture into the boiling milk, stirring constantly until thickened.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the filling into the baked pie crust and spread the whipped egg whites on top.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 custard filling as they set with heat.
Flour
Stabilises the custard so it thickens without becoming grainy.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the filling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the custard.
White sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps keep the yolks smooth.

The step that matters

Stirring the filling as it thickens. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if they overheat in contact with hot milk. Stirring constantly spreads the heat evenly so the custard thickens smoothly.

“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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