Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Butter with Sweetmeats

A sweet lemon butter dessert made with cream, almonds, egg whites, orange flower water, and lemon zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon Butter with Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream mixture

  1. Combine the boiling cream, pounded almonds, beaten egg whites, and orange flower water in a pot.

  2. Sweeten the mixture to taste.

  3. Zest the lemon and add the zest and juice to the cream mixture.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  2. Let the strained mixture drain well.

  3. Beat the drained mixture until smooth.

  4. Serve the smooth mixture high in a dish, surrounded by sweetmeats or ratafia cakes.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Boiling cream
Forms the rich, smooth body of the dessert and carries the other flavours.
Blanched jordan almonds
Add nutty flavour and body, and thicken the mixture as they are finely pounded.
Egg whites
Coagulate when heated, helping to set and give the mixture its light structure.
Lemon
Its zest and juice add bright acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness and richness.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Heating the egg whites in the cream lets them coagulate and thicken the mixture. Stirring while it heats keeps the proteins from scrambling into lumps, which would make the straining and final smoothing harder.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, orange, sugar, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes