Skip to main content
Dessert

Arrowroot Cream

A custard made with arrowroot, milk, spices, sugar, and egg yolk, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Arrowroot Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a little milk until smooth.

  2. Boil the milk with cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon rind, and loaf sugar.

  3. Once boiling, pour in the arrowroot mixture and stir continuously for 5 minutes.

  4. Let it cool for 30 minutes, then stir in the egg yolk.

Serve

  1. Serve cold in a glass dish with custard.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set custard as it heats.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens into custard.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the spice and lemon flavours.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and enriches the custard's colour and body.

The step that matters

Pour in the arrowroot mixture while the milk is boiling, then stir continuously. Arrowroot thickens when heated and must be stirred constantly so it does not clump or stick, giving a smooth, even set.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Spinachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes