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Dessert

Citron Cream

A green citrus cream made with icing sugar, lemon juice, butter, citron peel, and food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Citron Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine icing sugar and lemon juice in a bowl to form a paste slightly firmer than water icing.

  2. If the paste is too firm, add more lemon juice.

  3. Break the butter into small pieces, add to the mixture, and beat until light and fluffy.

  4. Add a few drops of green food coloring to achieve a pale green tint.

  5. Shred the soft citron peel very thin, chop until almost pulp, and mix into the cream thoroughly.

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. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Icing sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and with the lemon juice forms the paste's body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and beating it in makes the cream light and fluffy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and loosens the sugar into a spreadable paste.
Citron peel
Adds aromatic bitterness and fragrance; finely chopped, it spreads evenly through the cream.

The step that matters

Beating the butter into the sugar paste. Soft butter beaten with sugar traps air, which makes the cream light; if the butter is too cold or added in large lumps, it stays dense and streaky rather than fluffy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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