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Dessert

Yellow Lemon Cream

A lemon custard made with lemon peel, juice, egg yolks, sugar, and water, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Yellow Lemon Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the lemons thinly and place them in a saucepan with water.

  2. Squeeze the juice over the sugar.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks, then add the lemon peel and juice.

  2. Strain the mixture through a flannel into a saucepan.

  3. Heat over the fire, stirring until thick and scalding hot.

Serve

  1. Pour into jelly glasses and add lumps of sugar rubbed on the lemons.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as it heats and give it a rich, smooth set.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the custard and balances its sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and offsets the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon peel
Adds fragrant lemon oils that give the custard its aroma.

The step that matters

Heating and stirring until thick. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the mixture is heated too fast or left unstirred, the yolks can curdle or scramble, leaving a grainy texture. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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