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Dessert

Butter Scotch Pie

A pie filled with a buttery, sweet mixture of egg, flour, milk, and brown sugar, topped with nuts and a browned egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Butter Scotch Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix the egg yolk, flour, and 1 cup of milk in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Melt the butter in a skillet.

  3. Add ½ cup of brown sugar and 4 tablespoons of milk to the melted butter. Let it cool for 5 minutes.

  4. Pour the egg mixture into the skillet.

  5. Cook the mixture slowly until thick.

  6. Fill the baked pie crust with the mixture.

Top and brown

  1. Chop or grind the fine nuts.

  2. Sprinkle the nuts on top of the pie.

  3. Beat the egg white with a little sugar until stiff.

  4. Spread the stiff egg white on top of the pie and brown it.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Walnut + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 yolk
Thickens the custard as it cooks and adds richness to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the filling sets into a sliceable custard.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the filling and keeps it smooth and moist.
Brown sugar
Provides the sweetness and caramel flavor that makes this filling butterscotch.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor to the filling.
Egg white
Whipped stiff, it forms a light meringue topping that browns on the pie.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture slowly until thick. Egg yolk and flour thicken the filling only with gentle heat. If it cooks too fast or too hot, the yolk can curdle and the filling can scorch on the bottom before it thickens evenly.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, walnut, butter, 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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