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Dessert

Lemon Pie with Two Crusts

A lemon pie made with a lemon juice and rind filling, sugar, egg, butter, corn starch, and water, baked between two crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 with Two Crusts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Beat the lemon juice, grated rind, sugar, and egg together for 10 minutes.

  2. Rub the butter and corn starch together until well combined.

  3. Mix the butter and corn starch with the other ingredients and add the water. Stir until well mixed.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a deep pie pan lined with pie crust and cover with a top crust.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until set.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg
Adds structure and richness, helping the filling set when heated.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a filling that holds its shape when cooled.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Provides the acidity and bright lemon flavour of the filling.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel in the filling.

The step that matters

Stir the corn starch fully into the mixture before baking. Corn starch must be evenly dispersed to thicken properly; lumps left in the filling stay dry and gritty, and uneven mixing leads to a filling that does not set uniformly in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, butter, corn, 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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