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Dessert

Mock Cream Pie

A dessert pie made with a milk and flour custard flavored with lemon, baked in pie crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mock Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a kettle of water, boil the milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix flour with a little of the milk to create a paste.

  3. Add the flour paste, sugar, and well-beaten egg to the boiling milk.

  4. Stir until thick, then remove from heat and let cool.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake 2 pie crusts.

  2. Sprinkle flour between them to prevent sticking.

  3. Fill the cooled crusts with the cream mixture flavored with lemon.

  4. Optionally omit the top crust.

  5. Cover with light frosting.

  6. Brown quickly.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Milk
Forms the body of the custard filling once thickened.
Egg
Helps thicken and enrich the cream filling as it sets.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a stable, sliceable cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the flavor.

The step that matters

Stir until thick. Flour starch thickens only when the mixture is hot enough and stirred while it cooks. Stopping too early leaves a thin filling, and the egg can curdle if it is added to milk that is not kept moving.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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