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Dessert

Clotted Cream

Clotted cream made by simmering milk, rose water, mace, and egg yolks, then heating with cream and letting stand 24 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and rose work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 498 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Clotted Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Stir the blades of mace and add them to the new milk and rose water in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer for a few minutes, then strain the mixture into the beaten egg yolks.

  3. Stir this mixture into the quart of cream.

  4. Heat the mixture over low heat, stirring until hot but not boiling.

  5. Pour into a deep dish and let it stand for 24 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve in a cream dish, with or without fruit.

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. Mace + rosetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together498 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Mace + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Good cream
Provides the rich fat that gives clotted cream its thick, spoonable texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the cream as it heats gently.
New milk
Adds moisture and body, blending with the cream into the base mixture.
Rose water
Contributes a floral aroma to the finished cream.

The step that matters

Heat over low heat until hot but not boiling. Gentle heat lets the egg yolks thicken the cream without scrambling them. Boiling can curdle the eggs and leave a grainy texture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Macethe original
  4. Peppermintfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rose, egg, cream. 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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