Skip to main content
Dessert

Custard Pie

Custard pie is a baked pastry filled with a custard made from eggs, sugar, flour, milk, butter, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Custard Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat together the egg yolks, 1 cup of sugar, and 2 tablespoons of flour until well combined.

  2. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  3. Once boiling, stir in the egg mixture and add the butter.

  4. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, then gradually add 3 tablespoons of sugar.

Prepare the crust

  1. Prepare your pie crust.

  2. Bake the crust until golden.

Assemble and brown

  1. Spread the custard mixture over the baked crust.

  2. Brown the top.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set with heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Stabilizes the custard so it thickens without curdling or becoming runny.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the flavor and moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the custard's texture.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer flavor and smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot milk too quickly. Adding the mixture while stirring constantly and keeping the heat controlled lets the yolks thicken the custard smoothly instead of turning grainy.

“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 custard pie recipes

Apple 90Lemon 47Coconut 20Sweet Potato 13Chocolate 12Peach 12 See all 313 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes