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Dessert

Lemon or Orange Cream Without Cream

A citrus custard made with lemon or orange rind, sugar, and egg yolks or whites, cooked until thick.

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 ↓

Lemon or Orange Cream Without Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Shave the rind of the lemons or oranges into the water and boil until soft enough to mash.

  2. Rub sugar on the fruit to extract flavor, then remove the white pith and squeeze the juice.

  3. Combine the juice with the sugar to make a total of ½ pound of sugar.

Make the cream

  1. Beat the eggs and mix with the peel mixture, then strain into a clean saucepan.

  2. Heat gently, stirring continuously until thick and hot, but do not let it boil.

  3. Remove from heat and froth until nearly cold, then pour into serving dishes.

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

Eggs
Yolks or whites thicken the cream as they heat and set into a smooth custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the sharpness of the citrus juice.
Lemons or oranges
Provide the aromatic oil from the rind and the acidic juice that flavours the cream.

The step that matters

Heating the egg mixture gently. Egg proteins set into a smooth cream when heated slowly and stirred. If it boils or overheats, the eggs scramble and the cream turns grainy and curdled.

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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