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Dessert

Royal Spanish Cream

A custard-like dessert made with ground rice, lemon zest, egg yolks, milk, sugar, almonds, and preserved citrus.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Royal Spanish Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg yolks well in a bowl.

  2. Mix all ingredients except the almonds and preserved orange or citron.

Make the custard

  1. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and set over very low heat.

  2. Stir continuously in one direction until the mixture thickens more than custard.

Serve

  1. Pour into a glass dish and decorate with the blanched almonds and strips of preserved orange or citron.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they set with gentle heat, giving a rich, smooth body.
Ground rice
Starch that thickens the milk further and helps the cream hold its set.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the yolks and starch thicken into a cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and adds body to the custard.

The step that matters

Stirring the thickening mixture. Over very low heat, egg yolks can curdle or scorch if heated unevenly or too fast. Continuous, steady stirring keeps heat even so the custard thickens smoothly instead of lumping.

“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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