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Dessert

Lemon Moulds

A lemon custard set in a mould, made with corn flour, water, egg yolks, sugar, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,165 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Moulds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stir the corn flour into a paste with a little water.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the remaining water, sugar, and the rind of the lemons. Bring to a boil and let it boil for 5 minutes.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks and add the lemon juice. Stir this mixture into the corn flour paste.

  2. Combine the corn flour mixture with the strained lemon water and boil for 3 minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mould that has been dipped in cold water and leave to set.

  2. Serve with sponge fingers.

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. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Corn flour
Thickens the liquid into a firm, sliceable set as it cooks and cools.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the mixture as it heats.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the moulds and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemons
Provide the main flavour through their rind, juice and strained water.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolk mixture into the corn flour paste. Adding hot starch mixture to yolks can scramble them, so the yolks should be beaten and blended in smoothly. Boiling the starch fully afterwards cooks out its raw taste and sets the texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, flour, 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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