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Dessert

Lemon Cream

A lemon custard made with eggs, lemon, sugar, and water, folded with beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Lemon Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg yolks, sugar, grated lemon rind, lemon juice, and cold water together.

  2. Place the mixture in a double boiler and cook, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Fold in the egg whites beaten with 2 tablespoons of sugar.

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. Egg + lemontop 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

Eggs
Egg yolks set and thicken the custard as they heat, while whipped whites add lightness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and rind adds bright citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard over the double boiler. Egg yolk proteins set gradually as they heat. Heating too fast or leaving the mixture unstirred can make the yolks scramble and curdle, so constant stirring over gentle heat keeps the custard smooth and evenly thickened.

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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