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Dessert

Cream Pie

A pie with a corn starch and water base, boiled with sugar, egg white, salt, vanilla, baked in a crust, topped with icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Stir corn starch and water until smooth.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and add sugar; boil together.

  3. Add the beaten egg white, salt, and vanilla flavoring.

Bake the crust

  1. Line a pie plate with crust.

  2. Bake until golden.

Assemble and finish

  1. Once cooled, fill the crust with the cream mixture.

  2. Cover with white icing.

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

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

  2. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

  5. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, sliceable cream as it boils.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps give it a smooth, soft body.
Egg white
Beaten stiff, it adds lightness and airy body to the cream filling.

The step that matters

Boil the cornstarch mixture. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the liquid reaches a boil and is kept boiling briefly. Undercooked starch leaves the filling thin and runny, so it may not set when cooled.

“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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