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Dessert

Corn Starch Custard Pie

A custard pie made with milk, corn starch, sugar, eggs, and flavored with bitter almond, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,961 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Corn Starch Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the corn starch mixed with a little milk and boil for 1 minute.

  3. When nearly cold, stir in the sugar, egg yolks, and egg whites.

  4. Flavor with essence of bitter almond and pour into pie shells.

Top and brown

  1. Whip the remaining egg whites with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla to make a meringue.

  2. Once the custard is set, spread the meringue over the pies and brown quickly in the oven.

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. Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Corn + almondtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together485 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable custard when boiled.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the custard set as it cooks and cools.
Egg whites
Whipped into the meringue to give a light, foamy topping that browns.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the starch thickens.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard and softens its set texture.

The step that matters

Boil the corn starch mixture for 1 minute. Starch granules only thicken fully once they gelatinize at a boil. Undercooked starch leaves the custard thin and runny, so it needs to reach a full boil and stay there for the full minute.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Beansfits less well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

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