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Dessert

Rich Custards

A custard made with milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar, lemon peel, and cinnamon, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Rich Custards

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with lemon peel and cinnamon until it is flavored.

  2. In a bowl, mix the cream and beaten egg yolks.

  3. Sweeten the flavored milk to taste and pour it into the cream mixture, stirring well.

  4. Simmer the custard until it thickens, stirring continuously in one direction. Do not let it boil.

Notes

  1. For an extra rich custard, use 1 quart of cream instead of milk.

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. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Cinnamon and sugar 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set with gentle heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the custard a smooth, velvety mouthfeel.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that is flavored and then thickened into the custard.

The step that matters

Simmer the custard without boiling. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but past a gentle simmer they can scramble and curdle. Stirring steadily in one direction keeps heat even and the custard smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, cream, egg, 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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