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Dessert

Clara's Cream Pie

A custard pie made with milk, egg, flour, sugar, and a crust, baked and finished with browned egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Clara's Cream Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Stir the egg yolk, flour, and sugar together.

  2. Add to the milk when it is near boiling and flavor as desired.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake an under crust in a pie dish.

  2. Pour the cream mixture into the baked crust.

  3. Frost with the egg white and brown in the oven.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 liquid base that thickens into the cream filling.
Egg
Yolk thickens the filling; white is used to frost and brown the top.
Flour
Starch thickens the cream so it holds its shape when cut.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling stay smooth.

The step that matters

Adding the mixture to the milk. Egg and flour can clump or curdle if they meet very hot milk too quickly. Adding them when the milk is only near boiling helps the custard thicken evenly and stay smooth.

“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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