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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A pastry shell filled with a lemon custard thickened with cornstarch and flour, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix cornstarch and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add boiling water, stir, and cook until there is no raw starch taste.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and add a little of the hot mixture to temper them.

  4. Combine the egg yolks with the hot mixture and cook over low heat until thickened.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in butter, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cool slightly, then pour into the baked pastry shell.

  2. Cover with meringue and bake in a cool oven at 300°F (150°C) until meringue is cooked and lightly browned.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the filling as it cooks with the boiling water.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the filling as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the filling.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the pie's flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Tempering the egg yolks. Adding the hot mixture to the yolks a little at a time warms them gradually. Pouring it in all at once can scramble the yolks, leaving the filling lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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