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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon-flavored pie with a custard-like filling baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Lemon 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 filling

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar, butter, and egg yolks until very light.

  3. Stir in the milk and flour alternately.

  4. Beat the egg whites until very light and fold them into the mixture.

  5. Add the lemon juice and grated rind, mixing well.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the filling into a prepared pie crust and bake until set.

  2. Make a thin icing to drizzle over the pie once cooled.

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. 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. Lemon + milktop 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

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the filling and whipped whites lighten its texture.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Starch thickens the filling so it sets rather than staying runny.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharp lemon acidity.
Lemons
Juice and rind supply the acidity and aroma that define the pie.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites hold air only while they are whipped; stirring them in hard deflates the foam and the filling loses lightness. Fold gently so the mixture stays airy through baking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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