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Drink

Cambric Tea

A tea made with loaf sugar, cream, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cambric Tea

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place a lump of loaf sugar in a cup.

  2. Fill the cup one-third full with cream.

  3. Let it stand for 1 minute to melt the sugar.

  4. Fill the cup with boiling water directly from the kettle.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness, and dissolves into the warm liquid as it stands.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the tea's bitterness and giving a smoother mouthfeel.

“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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