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Caramel Filling

A sweet caramel filling made from dark brown sugar, water, butter, egg yolk, and optional nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Caramel Filling

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Caramel Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. In a saucepan, combine dark brown sugar and water.

  2. Add butter and cook until it forms a soft ball in cold water.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

Finish the filling

  1. Pour the mixture over the beaten egg yolk.

  2. Beat until creamy and add chopped nuts if desired.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Dark brown sugar
Provides sweetness and molasses flavour, and its sugar syrup sets into the filling as it cools.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture in the finished filling.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps the filling become creamy when beaten into the hot syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to a soft ball. Cooking the syrup to the soft-ball stage controls how much water remains. Too little cooking leaves a runny filling that won't set, while overcooking makes it hard and grainy as it cools.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, 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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