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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon custard pie with a puff pastry crust baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. 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 crust

  1. Make a rich puff pastry.

  2. Roll the pastry thin.

  3. Fit the pastry into a deep pie dish.

  4. Prick the crust before baking at 400°F (200°C).

Make the filling

  1. In a double boiler, beat the yolks of 6 eggs with 1 ½ cups of sugar and the grated rind and juice of 2 lemons.

  2. Stir constantly until thick.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Fill the pie shell with the mixture.

Bake and finish

  1. Return the pie to the oven until golden 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 as they gently set, and whites add lightness when folded in.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that gives the filling its bright, tart flavour.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic oils that give the filling a fresh lemon scent.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten structure of the pastry that holds the shell together.

The step that matters

Stir constantly until thick. Egg yolks thicken gently over indirect heat, but if they get too hot they can scramble and turn grainy. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the custard sets smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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