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Dessert

Cream Pie

A pie made from a milk‑corn starch custard and a sweet cake batter, baked and filled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the filling

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, mix corn starch with a little milk until smooth, then add the eggs.

  3. Once the milk has boiled, slowly stir in the corn starch mixture, sugar, butter, and lemon juice.

Make and bake the cake

  1. In another bowl, beat the eggs and sugar for the cake until fluffy.

  2. Add flour mixed with baking powder and cold water to the egg mixture, and stir until combined.

  3. Pour the cake batter into two pie pans and bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

Assemble

  1. While the cake is hot, split it in half and spread the cream filling inside.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 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

Eggs
Add structure to the cake and thicken the cream filling as they set with heat.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream filling into a smooth, sliceable custard as it heats with the milk.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the cream filling.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake batter so it holds once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and filling and helps the cake brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch mixture to the boiling milk. Corn starch must be fully dispersed in cold milk first and then stirred into hot milk, or it forms lumps. Stirring while it heats lets the starch granules swell and thicken the filling evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More cream pie recipes

Lemon 54Boston 44Sour 38Coconut 24Whipped 20Orange 18 See all 378 →

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