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Lemon or Orange Cream Without Cream

A custard made with lemon or orange zest, juice, sugar, and eggs, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange Cream Without Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Shave the rind of the lemons or oranges into the water and boil until soft enough to mash.

  2. Rub sugar on the fruit to extract flavor and color.

  3. Remove the white pith and squeeze the juice into the sugar, using a total of ½ pound of sugar.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Mix the peels, liquid, juice, and sugar with the eggs.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth into a clean saucepan.

  4. Heat gently, stirring continuously until thick and hot, but do not let it boil.

  5. Remove from heat and beat until nearly cold.

  6. Pour into jelly glasses.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Eggs
Egg yolks or whites thicken the custard as they heat and set it into a soft, spoonable texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, rubbed on the fruit, helps draw out flavor and color from the rind.
Lemons or oranges
Provide the main flavor, aroma and acidity, with the rind and juice both used.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Egg proteins thicken the custard as it warms, but if it boils the eggs can scramble and curdle, leaving a grainy texture. Stirring constantly and stopping once it is thick and hot keeps it smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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