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Dessert

Cream Pie

A baked pie with a butter‑sugar‑egg crust and a boiled milk‑flour filling flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 and baking powder together.

  6. Add the sifted mixture to the batter.

  7. Divide the batter between two pie tins.

  8. Bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 1 pint of milk.

  2. Take out enough milk to wet ½ cup flour, then mix the flour with the milk.

  3. Add the mixture to the boiling milk.

  4. Stir in ⅔ cup sugar and the egg yolks.

  5. Boil for 3 minutes.

  6. Once cooled, flavor with lemon or vanilla.

  7. Spread the filling between the baked pie crusts.

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the crust and thickens the filling as its starch swells with heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the crust rise and turn light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the crust batter as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crust and carries flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the crust and filling and helps the crust brown.
Milk
Provides moisture to the batter and forms the base of the custard filling.

The step that matters

Boil the filling while stirring. The custard thickens as flour starch swells and the egg yolks set with heat. Keep stirring to prevent lumps or scrambling, and boil long enough for the starch to thicken fully.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, 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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