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Dessert

Lemon Custard

A baked lemon custard topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Lemon Custard

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 Custard

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 the custard

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

  2. Beat the egg yolks and 1 cup of sugar together with half of the egg whites.

  3. Add the lemon juice, lemon rind, and butter to the mixture.

  4. Thin the mixture with ½ cup of milk.

  5. Pour into a pie crust and bake until set.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the remaining egg whites with 5 tablespoons of sugar until stiff.

  2. Spread the meringue over the cooled custard and brown in the oven.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and whites build the airy meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and stabilizes the beaten egg white meringue.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the custard.
Milk
Thins the custard so it stays smooth and pours easily.

The step that matters

Pour into a pie crust and bake until set. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overbaking can curdle them and make the filling weep or turn grainy. Bake only until the custard is set.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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