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Dessert

Cream for Filling

A lemon-flavored custard cream made with milk, eggs, sugar, flour, butter, and lemon zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream for Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. In a bowl, beat together the egg, ½ cup sugar, and 1 tablespoon flour.

  3. Add the egg mixture to the boiling milk and let it cool.

Make the filling

  1. In another bowl, cream ½ cup butter and slowly add 1 cup sugar, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  2. Mix in the beaten yolks of 4 eggs.

  3. Combine ¼ teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon baking soda, and ¼ cup flour; add to the mixture and beat thoroughly.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 thicken the filling and enrich its texture, while whipped whites add lightness.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender, smooth body to the filling.
Flour
Starch that thickens the milk mixture and helps give the filling body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps cream the butter to a light texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour that balances the sweetness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg mixture cooks into a custard.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the boiling milk. Eggs can scramble if they meet very hot liquid too quickly. Stirring the mixture steadily while adding it to the boiling milk helps the eggs thicken the custard smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, flour, butter. 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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