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Dessert

Burnt Cream

A custard made with milk, corn starch, burnt brown sugar, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 349 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Burnt Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Blend the corn starch with a little cold milk, then add it to the boiling milk and stir until thickened.

  3. In an iron pan, burn the brown sugar until it is deep brown.

  4. Pour the burnt sugar into the corn starch mixture and add the walnuts.

Set and serve

  1. Pour everything into a mold and let it cool.

  2. Serve with cream 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.

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. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Milk + walnuttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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 that the thickened custard is built on.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the custard its body and set.
Brown sugar
Burned to deep brown, it gives the custard its bitter-caramel flavor and color.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a nutty flavor against the smooth custard.

The step that matters

Burning the brown sugar. Sugar goes from amber to bitter black within seconds once it passes deep brown. Stop heating at the right moment, because over-burnt sugar tastes acrid and cannot be rescued.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Lima beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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