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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A lemon-flavored pie made with sugar, flour, egg yolks, butter, lemon juice and rind, milk, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix together sugar, flour, egg yolks, butter, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  2. Just before pouring the mixture into the pie crust, add milk and fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour into pie crust and bake.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Add richness and help thicken the custard as it sets.
Egg whites
Fold in to lighten the filling and add airy structure.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it holds its shape when sliced.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the lemon's acidity.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp, bright flavour that defines the pie.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Fold gently and add the whites just before baking so the air bubbles stay trapped. Overmixing deflates the whites, leaving a dense, flat filling.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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