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Dessert

Burnt Cream

A custard dessert made by boiling cream with sugar, lemon rind, and cinnamon, then mixing with egg yolks and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Burnt Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the cream with sugar, lemon rind, and cinnamon for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon rind and cinnamon.

  3. Gradually pour the boiled cream over the well-beaten egg yolks. Beat everything together and pour into a dish or glasses.

Brown and serve

  1. When the mixture is cold, sift sugar thickly over the top.

  2. Brown the sugared top with a salamander.

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 + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Provides the rich liquid base and fat that give the custard its smooth, creamy body.
Egg yolks
Coagulate as they heat, setting the cream into a thick, smooth custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, when melted on top, forms the brittle caramel crust.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavour to the cream as it boils.

The step that matters

Brown the sugared top with a salamander. The sugar must be heated quickly until it melts and caramelises without warming the chilled custard beneath. Too slow and the custard heats and curdles; too little heat and the crust stays grainy rather than glassy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, cinnamon, 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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