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Dessert

Frangipan Cream

A sweet pastry cream made with flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, and flavouring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Frangipan Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a small saucepan, combine 8 egg yolks, 4 egg whites, flour, sugar, and salt.

  2. Stir and cook over low heat until well mixed.

  3. Gradually add the milk while stirring until smooth.

  4. Stir in the butter and cook gently for about 10 minutes.

Flavour and cool

  1. Transfer to a bowl, add flavouring to taste, and let cool before using to fill tartlets.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 proteins set as the mixture heats, thickening the cream into a custard.
Flour
Starch thickens with heat, giving the cream body and a stable structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cooked cream a smooth, soft texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that makes the cream smooth and moist.
Butter
Adds fat, which enriches the flavour and softens the texture of the cream.

The step that matters

Cook gently over low heat while stirring. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures, so high heat or inattentive stirring can scramble the eggs and leave lumps in 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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