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Dessert

Cream Pie

A pie with a butter‑sugar‑egg batter crust and a milk‑sugar‑egg yolk filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

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 crust

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the eggs and mix well.

  4. Stir in the milk.

  5. Sift the flour with the baking powder and add to the mixture.

  6. Divide the batter into two pie tins.

  7. Bake the pie tins until golden.

Make the filling

  1. Take 1 pint of milk for the filling.

  2. Reserve some of the milk to wet ½ cup of flour.

  3. Boil the remaining milk.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the reserved milk with ⅔ cup sugar and the egg yolks.

  5. Stir this mixture into the boiling milk.

  6. Cook the mixture for 3 minutes.

  7. Once cooled, flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the filling between the baked pie crusts.

  2. Cut the pie into slices.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to give the crust a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure as they set.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they cook in the hot milk, giving it a smooth, custard-like body.
Flour
Provides the structure of the crust and helps thicken the filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the crust rises and turns light.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and forms the base of the filling.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Adding cold egg yolks to very hot milk can scramble them. Keeping the heat controlled while stirring lets the yolks thicken the filling smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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