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Dessert

Yellow Lemon Cream, Without Cream

A lemon custard made with lemon zest, juice, sugar, and egg yolks, thickened over gentle heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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, Without Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons and sugar

  1. Pare the lemons very thin and squeeze the juice onto the sugar.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks well and add the lemon peels and juice, mixing thoroughly.

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

  3. Set the saucepan over gentle heat and stir until thick and scalding hot, but not boiling.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into jelly glasses and let it cool before serving.

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 they set with gentle heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemons
Provide the juice for tartness and the peel for aromatic lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Stir over gentle heat until thick but not boiling. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with heat, but if the custard boils they can curdle and turn grainy. Stirring constantly over gentle heat keeps it smooth.

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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