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Dessert

Imperial Cream

A chilled lemon cream made by boiling cream with lemon rind, sweetened with sugar, and folded with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Imperial Cream

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Imperial Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Boil the cream with the lemon rind.

  2. Sweeten with loaf sugar and stir until nearly cold.

Serve

  1. Strain the juice of the lemons into the serving bowl.

  2. Pour the cream into the bowl from a height, mixing it with the lemon juice.

  3. Make this cream several hours before serving; it keeps well until the next day.

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

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

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

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

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Cream
Forms the body of the dessert, setting into a rich, thick texture as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that thickens the cream and gives it a bright, sharp flavour.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Pouring the cream from a height into the lemon juice. Pouring from a height mixes the cream and lemon juice evenly without over-whisking. The acid in the juice thickens the cream as it combines, so the mixing needs to be gentle and complete.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, 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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