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Dessert

Cream Pie

A custard pie with a meringue topping made from milk, corn starch, eggs, sugar, lemon, and a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little milk.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and sugar until light, then stir into the scalding milk.

  4. Flavor with lemon and let cool.

Prepare the crust

  1. Line a pie plate with the crust.

  2. Bake the crust.

Assemble and brown

  1. Fill the baked crust with the cream mixture.

  2. Beat the egg whites with powdered sugar to make meringue.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pie.

  4. Brown the meringue 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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that sets when cooled.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard as it heats, giving it a smooth, sliceable body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it thicken into a creamy texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a foam that becomes the meringue topping.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily into the whites, helping the meringue stay stable and glossy.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolks into the scalding milk. Adding hot milk to egg yolks too fast can scramble them. Beating the yolks with sugar first and stirring steadily into the hot milk keeps the custard smooth and lets it thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More cream pie recipes

Lemon 54Boston 44Sour 38Coconut 24Whipped 20Orange 18 See all 378 →

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