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Dessert

Transparent Pie

A sugar and butter pie with eggs, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Transparent Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Cream together the white sugar and butter.

  2. Add the well beaten eggs and mix until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a prepared lower pie crust.

  2. Bake until set.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps structure the filling as it is creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a smoother texture.
Eggs
Set during baking to thicken the filling and give it structure.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Underbaking leaves the filling runny, while overbaking can make it curdle or weep, so watch for the filling to firm up without bubbling hard.

“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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