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Dessert

Corn Starch Pie

A pie made with a corn starch custard filling baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Corn Starch Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a warm bowl, beat together corn starch, sugar, sweet milk, and egg yolks.

  2. Stir in the boiling milk and let it boil once.

  3. Add vanilla or lemon extract and a pinch of salt.

  4. Pour the mixture into a baked pie crust.

Top and brown

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff.

  2. Spread the egg white mixture over the pie 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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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 mixture into a smooth, sliceable custard filling.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken and set the custard filling.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a stiff meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Boiling milk
Hydrates the starch and carries the flavor of the custard filling.

The step that matters

Let the filling boil once after adding the boiling milk. Corn starch only thickens fully when it reaches a boil, so the filling needs to come to a boil to set properly once cooled.

“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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