Skip to main content
Dessert

Frosted Cream Pie

A pie with a milk and egg yolk filling topped with a whipped egg white frosting.

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

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 ↓

Frosted Cream 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.

Make the custard

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine milk, egg yolks, 1 egg white, sugar, and salt.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake until set.

Frost and brown

  1. In another bowl, beat the 2 egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gradually add powdered sugar and a pinch of salt, then mix in your chosen flavoring.

  3. Spread the frosting over the baked pie and return it to the oven to brown.

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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich it, helping it set when baked.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving it moisture and a soft texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into stiff peaks to form a light, airy meringue topping.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue and dissolves easily into the whipped whites.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to stiff peaks. Whites must be beaten until they hold stiff peaks without grease or leftover yolk, since fat stops them foaming and a loose meringue will weep or spread instead of standing up on the pie.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes