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Dessert

Washington Pie

A custard-filled pie with a sweet batter of sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Washington 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter, then add the eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in the sweet milk.

  4. Gradually add the flour and baking powder, mixing until smooth.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased pie dish and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, beat the eggs and mix with cornstarch dissolved in a little milk.

  2. Heat the pint of milk and add the egg mixture, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Sweeten the custard to taste and let it cool.

Assemble and serve

  1. Once the cake is baked and cooled, cut it and spread the custard between the layers.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and thicken the custard as they set with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the cake crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the cake rise and turn light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the custard into a smooth, spreadable filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and custard and softens the crumb.

The step that matters

Stirring the custard until it thickens. Egg proteins set with heat, so the custard can curdle or turn lumpy if it boils or heats too fast. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly and lets the cornstarch thicken the milk smoothly.

“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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