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Dessert

Orange Cream Pies

A custard pie made with eggs, sugar, flour, corn starch, milk, orange extract, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Orange Cream Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the sugar until well combined.

  2. Add the flour and corn starch dissolved in a little milk to the egg mixture.

  3. Pour this mixture into the boiling milk and cook for 3 minutes.

  4. Once cool, flavor with orange extract.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the baked pie crust and set in the oven for a few minutes.

  2. Make a meringue by beating the egg whites with the sugar until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread the meringue on top of the pie and return to the oven until golden brown.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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 milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Yolks thicken the custard and enrich its texture; whites whip into the meringue topping.
Flour
Starch that thickens the custard so it sets into a sliceable filling.
Corn starch
Additional thickener that helps the custard set firm and glossy.
Milk
Forms the body of the custard filling, which thickens as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, in the meringue, stabilises the whipped whites.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard in boiling milk. Starch thickens only when the mixture reaches a boil, so the custard must be stirred and cooked long enough for the flour and corn starch to fully gelatinise, or the filling will stay thin.

“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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