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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon custard pie made with eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and hot water, topped with browned meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and walnut 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 ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Grate the lemon and extract the juice.

  2. Mix the grated lemon, juice, sugar, flour, and yolks of the eggs in a bowl.

  3. Cook the mixture in 2 cups of hot water until thickened.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Sprinkle the beaten egg whites with sugar.

  3. Spread the beaten egg whites over the pie filling.

  4. Brown the pie in a 400°F (200°C) 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. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the filling and whites form a light meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue stay stable and brown.
Flour
Thickens the lemon filling so it sets rather than running.
Lemon
Provides the acidity and aroma that define the pie's flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten to stiff peaks to trap air and hold their shape. Under-beaten whites weep or collapse on the filling, while over-beaten whites turn grainy and dry.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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

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