Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Sunny Silver Pie

A lemon custard pie topped with meringue and chilled.

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

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Sunny Silver Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Beat egg yolks until thick, then add 1/2 cup sugar while beating constantly.

  2. Cook the mixture in a double boiler until creamy.

  3. Soak gelatine in lemon juice for five minutes, then dissolve in boiling water.

  4. Add the dissolved gelatine and salt to the egg mixture and cool.

Make the meringue and assemble

  1. Beat egg whites with the remaining sugar and lemon extract to make a meringue.

  2. Fold the meringue into the egg yolk mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baked pie shell and chill for at least 4 hours.

  4. Top with whipped cream before serving.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Egg yolks thicken the filling and whites form the airy meringue structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the beaten egg whites in the meringue.
Gelatine
Sets the lemon filling so it holds its shape when sliced.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet filling and helps bloom the gelatine.
Lemon extract
Adds concentrated lemon aroma to the meringue and filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the yolk mixture in a double boiler. Gentle, indirect heat thickens the egg yolks slowly as their proteins set. Too much heat scrambles them into lumps, so stir steadily and stop once the mixture is creamy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes