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Dessert

Burnt Cream

A custard made from cream, cinnamon, lemon peel, and egg yolks, topped with browned sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Burnt Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the cream with cinnamon and lemon peel.

  2. Remove the cream from heat.

  3. Slowly pour the hot cream into the egg yolks.

  4. Stir the mixture until it is half cold.

  5. Sweeten the custard to taste.

  6. Remove the cinnamon and lemon peel from the custard.

  7. Pour the custard into a dish.

  8. Let the custard cool.

Brown and serve

  1. Sprinkle pounded sugar on top of the custard.

  2. Brown the sugar with a salamander.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cream
Provides richness and fat, giving the custard a smooth, creamy body.
Egg yolks
Set with gentle heat to thicken the cream into a custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and forms the caramelised crust when browned.

The step that matters

Slowly pour the hot cream into the egg yolks. Adding hot cream too fast can scramble the egg yolks, leaving lumps instead of a smooth custard. Pouring slowly while stirring gently tempers the eggs so they thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, cinnamon, egg, 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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