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Dessert

Custard Cream

A sweet custard made from milk, cream, egg yolks, cinnamon, lemon peel, and optional laurel leaves or bitter almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Custard Cream

Why it works: Cinnamon and laurel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 691 recipes. Both carry cinnamyl acetate, which smells sweet aromatic, cinnamon. The science ↓

Custard Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with cinnamon, lemon peel, laurel leaves, and bruised almonds.

  2. Strain the mixture and add it to the cream.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg yolks and sweeten with sugar.

  4. Cook in a saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly until it thickens but does not boil.

Chill and serve

  1. Pour into a deep dish and stir occasionally until cold.

  2. Serve in a glass dish or custard cups.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + laureltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together691 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

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

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + laureltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

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

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 over gentle heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Cream
Provides richness and fat, giving the custard a smooth, velvety mouthfeel.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that is infused with flavour and then thickened.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the richness of the cream and yolks.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heating, around the point where proteins set. Too much heat or boiling can curdle the custard into grainy lumps, so constant stirring over low heat is needed.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, laurel, cream, 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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