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Dessert

Lemon Butter

A custard made from lemon juice, sugar, eggs, and butter, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,149 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Squeeze the lemons and collect the juice.

  2. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice, sugar, yolks of 6 eggs, and whites of 4 eggs. Beat well.

  3. Add the butter to the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat the mixture until it boils, then pour it into a dish.

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 + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 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 and whites thicken the mixture as it heats, giving the custard its set body.
Lemons
Juice supplies the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Pulverized sugar
Sweetens the custard and dissolves smoothly into the lemon juice.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the custard.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture until it boils. Egg proteins thicken as they heat, but overheating or boiling too hard can curdle or scramble them, leaving a grainy texture. Watch closely and stop heating once it thickens.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Milletfits about as well

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