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Another Way to Make Imperial Cream

A sweet custard made with orange‑flower water, lemon juice, sugar, milk, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Imperial Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Flavour the juice

  1. Add orange-flower water to the lemon juice.

  2. Stir in pounded loaf sugar until thick like syrup.

Heat the milk

  1. Boil the milk with half the lemon peel and a little sugar.

  2. Stir the milk until warm, then pour it into a teapot.

Combine and pour

  1. Pour the mixture from the teapot into a dish placed on the floor.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

Lemon juice
Adds acidity and causes the milk proteins to thicken and curdle.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the dish.
Pounded loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the lemon juice into a syrup.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma.
Lemon peel
Adds aroma from its citrus oils as it steeps in the hot milk.

The step that matters

Stir the milk until warm, then pour it. The milk should be warm, not boiling, when it meets the acidic lemon mixture. Heat and acid together curdle milk proteins, so overheating the milk can make the cream grainy or split instead of smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, milk. 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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