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Dessert

Tea Cream

A chilled custard made with green tea, milk, egg yolks, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Tea Cream

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tea Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Boil 2 teaspoons of green tea in 1 quart of milk for several minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture.

Thicken and serve

  1. Add the well-beaten yolks of 3 eggs and ¼ pound of powdered sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reduces to ½ its volume.

  3. Strain it again.

  4. Serve when cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Green tea + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds body and richness to the cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as their proteins set with gentle heat, adding richness.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavor of the green tea.
Green tea
Gives the cream its characteristic aroma and grassy, slightly bitter flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it reduces to ½ its volume. Once the yolks are in, the heat must stay controlled. Egg proteins set with heat and can curdle or scramble if boiled too hard, while reduction concentrates the flavor and thickens the cream.

“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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