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Dessert

To Make Lemon Cream

A lemon-flavored custard made with water, lemon rind, juice, egg whites, yolks, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Lemon Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Combine strong water, lemon rinds, and lemon juice in a pot.

  2. Beat the egg whites until well mixed, then add to the pot.

  3. Stir in sugar to taste and heat the mixture over low heat, stirring until it thickens but does not boil.

  4. Strain the mixture through a cloth.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks and add them to the strained mixture, cooking until thick.

  2. Pour the mixture into a bowl to cool, then transfer to glasses.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Egg whites
Add body and help the cream thicken as it heats.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture into a rich, set cream when cooked gently.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the cream's flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture without boiling. Egg proteins set gently as the mixture heats. If it boils, the eggs can curdle and turn grainy, so keep the heat low and stir steadily until it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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