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Dessert

Burnt Cream

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon 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 sugar, lemon rind, and cinnamon for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon and cinnamon from the mixture.

  3. Gradually pour the cream over the beaten egg yolks and mix well.

  4. Pour the mixture into a dish or glasses.

Top and brown

  1. Once cold, sift sugar thickly over the top and brown 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. Lemon + cinnamontop 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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 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).

Sugar and cinnamon 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 the liquid base that sets into a smooth custard.
Egg yolks
Coagulate as they heat, thickening and setting the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and forms the brittle caramel crust when browned.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright citrus aroma to the infused cream.
Cinnamon
Adds warm spiced aroma to the infused cream.

The step that matters

Gradually pour the cream over the egg yolks. Adding the hot cream slowly, while whisking, raises the yolks' temperature gently. This keeps the egg proteins from scrambling, so the custard sets smooth instead of curdled.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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