Skip to main content
Dessert

Pastry Cream

A thickened cream mixture flavored with cinnamon, lemon peel, and orange flower water, then fried in lard after coating with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Pastry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Combine cream, cinnamon, lemon peel, flour, butter, egg yolks, egg whites, sugar, and orange-flower water in a pot.

  2. Heat over medium until thickened.

  3. Stir in ratafias and citron, mixing well.

  4. Let the mixture cool completely.

Fry and serve

  1. Cut into desired shapes.

  2. Dip each shape in raw egg yolks.

  3. Coat with bread crumbs.

  4. Fry in boiling lard until light golden.

  5. Drain and serve hot.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they set with heat and add richness.
Flour
Stabilizes the cream so it thickens into a sliceable mass.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps keep it tender.
Ratafias
Add almond-like aroma and flavor to the cream.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture completely before shaping. Warm cream is too soft to hold a shape. Cooling lets the starch and egg proteins set so the pieces keep their form and do not collapse when dipped and fried.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, cinnamon, lemon, flour, butter, 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.

More pastry cream recipes

Puff 5Chocolate 3 See all 52 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes