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Dessert

Lemon Pie

A baked lemon custard pie topped with a whipped egg white meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 697 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lemon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Line a pie plate with pastry.

Make and bake the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine lemon juice, lemon rind, egg yolks, crushed soda biscuits, sugar, and boiling water.

  2. Pour the mixture into the prepared pie crust and bake until set.

Top with meringue

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then spread over the pie.

  2. Return the pie to the oven for a few minutes to brown the meringue.

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. Lemon + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Biscuit + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness as they set during baking.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that sets and forms the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the meringue stay glossy and stable.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the filling.
Soda biscuits
Crushed biscuits add body and help thicken the filling.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks. Under-whipped whites collapse and weep, while the whites must be spread over the filling so they seal to the crust. Stiff peaks hold their shape and brown evenly in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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