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Dessert

Lemon and Orange Cream

A sweetened citrus infusion made by boiling lemon or orange zest and juice with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Lemon and Orange Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Infuse the grated zest of the lemons or oranges in ½ cup of boiling water, covering it tightly.

  2. Cut the fruit in half and squeeze the juice into the infused water.

  3. Strain the mixture and boil it with ¾ pound of sugar until dissolved.

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).

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

Lemons or oranges
The zest gives aroma and the juice adds the sharp acidity that defines the flavour.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and balances the sourness of the citrus juice.

The step that matters

Boil with the sugar until fully dissolved. Undissolved sugar crystals can leave a grainy texture in the finished cream, so the mixture should be heated until the sugar is completely dissolved and no crystals remain.

“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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