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Citron Cream, Crime De CSdrats distillSe

A distilled citron liqueur made with citrons, brandy, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Brandy and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Citron Cream, Crime De CSdrats distillSe

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Zest the citrons.

  2. Add the zest to a jar with the brandy and 4 pints of water. Seal the jar tightly.

  3. Let the mixture infuse for several days.

Distill and finish

  1. Distill the mixture using a bain-marie until you have about 18 pints of liquid.

  2. Dissolve 3.5 pounds of sugar in 14 pints of water.

  3. Combine the sugar solution with the distilled spirit and filter through a bag or cloth.

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. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Citrons
Their zest supplies the main citrus aroma and flavour that infuses into the spirit.
Brandy
Acts as the alcoholic base that extracts and carries the citrus aromas.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the alcohol and citrus notes.

The step that matters

Seal the jar tightly during infusion. Alcohol and aromatic compounds evaporate readily, so a loose seal lets the volatile citrus oils escape and weakens the flavour extracted into the brandy.

“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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