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Dessert

Another Way to Make Imperial Cream

A sweet milk dessert flavored with orange flower water, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Another Way to Make Imperial Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lemon mixture

  1. Combine the orange-flower water and lemon juice in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the pounded loaf sugar until thick like syrup.

Make the milk and combine

  1. Boil the milk with half the lemon peel and a little sugar.

  2. Let the milk cool until warm, then combine it with the lemon mixture.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a teapot and serve in a dish placed on the floor.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Milk
Forms the creamy base and its proteins set into curds when combined with the acidic lemon mixture.
Lemon juice
Provides acidity that thickens and curdles the milk proteins, giving the cream its body and tang.
Pounded loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved into the juice, gives the mixture a thick syrupy texture.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma that perfumes the cream.

The step that matters

Let the milk cool until warm before combining. Hot milk poured into the acidic lemon mixture curdles quickly and becomes grainy. Letting it cool to warm slows protein coagulation, so the cream stays smoother and more evenly combined.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, milk. 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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