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Dessert

Another Way to Make Burnt Cream

A custard dessert flavored with lemon peel and bitter almonds, topped with caramel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Burnt Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with flour, lemon peel, and pounded almonds.

  2. Sweeten with pounded loaf sugar and stir over low heat until thickened like custard.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a serving dish.

Make the caramel and serve

  1. In a saucepan, boil a little water with pounded loaf sugar until it turns brown, without stirring.

  2. Carefully pour the caramel in figures over the top of the cream.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 as they heat, setting the mixture into a rich, custard-like cream.
Flour
Stabilizes the custard so it thickens smoothly and holds its shape.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cream and, when heated dry with water, browns into the caramel topping.

The step that matters

Caramelizing the sugar without stirring. Stirring sugar as it boils can cause crystallization, leaving a grainy rather than glassy caramel. Letting it brown undisturbed keeps the sugar smooth and lets it color evenly before it is poured.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, almond, 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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