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Dessert

Buttercup Cream

A chilled custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, lemon juice, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Buttercup Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in the cold milk.

  2. Heat the mixture until boiling.

  3. Slowly pour the hot milk over the beaten egg yolks and sugar, stirring constantly.

Fold and set

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold them into the custard along with the lemon juice.

  2. Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate until set.

Serve

  1. Serve with jelly.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon 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
Yolks thicken the custard and whites, beaten stiff, lighten the texture.
Crystal gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a firm, sliceable structure when chilled.
Cold milk
Forms the liquid base that the gelatine dissolves into and the custard is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the tartness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the richness of the custard.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot milk into the yolks. Adding hot milk slowly while stirring constantly warms the yolks gradually, so they thicken smoothly instead of scrambling into lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg. 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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