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Dessert

Lemon Butter with Sweetmeats

A sweet lemon custard made with cream, almonds, egg whites, orange flower water, lemon zest and juice, served with sweetmeats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Lemon Butter with Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. In a pot, add the blanched almonds to the boiling cream.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg whites, orange flower water, and sugar.

  3. Rasp the lemon rind and add it along with the lemon juice to the mixture.

  4. Boil the mixture, then strain it through a fine sieve.

Serve

  1. Once drained, beat the mixture until smooth and mound it in a serving dish.

  2. Garnish with sweetmeats or ratafia cakes around the dish.

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. Orange + lemontop 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the rich body of the dessert and carries the other flavours.
Egg whites
Set on heating to give the mixture its light, thickened structure.
Blanched almonds
Add nutty flavour and body to the cream once finely pounded.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and richness of the cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and balances the acidity of the lemon.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture, then strain it through a fine sieve. Egg whites set when heated, so boiling thickens the mixture; straining through a fine sieve removes any set bits and almond fragments, leaving a smooth result.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, orange, sugar, lemon. 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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