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Dessert

Lemon Cream Pie

A custard pie made with lemon juice, zest, and sugar, topped with a stiff‑egg‑white meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Lemon Cream Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs separately.

  2. Beat the whites of the eggs separately.

  3. Add sugar, flour, lemon juice, lemon rind, and boiling water to the beaten yolks.

  4. Cook the mixture in a double boiler until it begins to thicken.

  5. Add half of the beaten egg whites to the mixture. Stir the mixture thoroughly.

  6. Once thickened, fill a baked pie shell with the custard.

Make the meringue and finish

  1. Beat the egg whites stiff.

  2. Gradually add icing sugar to the stiff egg whites.

  3. Spread the meringue on top of the filling.

  4. Brown the meringue slightly in a slow 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.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Yolks thicken the custard and whites add lightness and structure to the meringue.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.
Flour
Thickens the custard so it sets into a sliceable filling.
Lemon juice
Adds the sharp acidity that defines the lemon flavour of the filling.
Icing sugar
Sweetens and stabilises the stiff egg whites in the meringue.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until it just begins to thicken. Heating egg yolks thickens them, but too much heat scrambles the eggs and makes the filling grainy. Cooking gently in a double boiler, then stirring, keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour. 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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