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Dessert

Cream Pie

A sweet pie with a lemon-flavored custard filling baked in a pastry 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 ↓

Cream 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 batter

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix powdered sugar, flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and set aside.

  4. In another bowl, beat the egg yolks with grated lemon rind.

  5. Combine the dry ingredients with the egg yolk mixture, then gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  6. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake until golden.

Make the cream and assemble

  1. For the cream, heat the milk in a double boiler until scalding hot.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix sugar, salt, and one egg, then stir into the hot milk until thickened.

  3. Once cool, add vanilla extract and pour between the baked 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. 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Whites trap air for lift, while yolks enrich the batter and cream and help it set.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites so they hold their stiff peaks.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps it rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the baked batter together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream, which thickens as it heats with the egg.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dissolves smoothly into the dry mix.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg into the hot milk. Egg proteins thicken when heated gently, but if the mixture gets too hot or is added too quickly, the egg can scramble into lumps. Tempering the egg and keeping the heat moderate keeps the cream smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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