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Dessert

Burned Cream

A custard made with milk, egg yolks, sugar, and burnt sugar, thickened with cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Burned Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, 1 cup sugar, and egg yolks.

  2. Dissolve cornstarch in a little milk and add to the mixture.

  3. Boil until thick.

Burn the sugar and combine

  1. In a separate pan, burn ½ cup sugar until brown.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the burned sugar; it will harden but will dissolve.

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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 yolks
Thicken the custard as they set when heated, giving it a rich body.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid when boiled, giving the custard its final body.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, when burned, provides the caramel flavor and color.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard.

The step that matters

Pour the milk mixture over the burned sugar. Burned sugar hardens on contact with cold liquid, so it may seize into lumps. Pouring gradually and stirring helps the caramel dissolve back into the custard.

“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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