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Dessert

Cream Pie

A baked pie with a sweet cream filling made from sugar, flour, eggs, milk, and vanilla or lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Cream 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 cup sugar, 1½ cups flour, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoons sweet milk, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, and ½ teaspoon baking soda.

  3. Pour the mixture into jelly cake pans or pie pans and bake until golden.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, stir together ½ cup sugar and ½ cup flour in a separate bowl.

  2. Add 2 eggs and mix well.

  3. Gradually stir this mixture into 1 pint of boiling milk, stirring constantly.

  4. Allow to boil for 2-3 minutes until thickened.

  5. Remove from heat and flavor with 1 teaspoon of vanilla or lemon essence.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cream between the baked cakes.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and, in the cream, help thicken it as they set with heat.
Flour
Provides the structure of the cake and, in the cream, thickens the custard with the milk.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and cream and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Boiling milk
Forms the base of the cream, which thickens as the starch cooks in it.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, working with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the cake.

The step that matters

Adding the egg-flour mixture to the boiling milk. Stirring constantly while pouring prevents lumps, because flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Boiling then cooks the starch so the cream thickens properly.

“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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