Skip to main content
Dessert

Creme Frite

A custard dessert made by boiling cream, thickening with flour, adding eggs, frying pieces, and serving with a wine-sugar-nutmeg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creme Frite

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the cream in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour, sugar, and grated lemon peel; stir well.

  3. Let it simmer until the raw taste of the flour is gone.

  4. Once cool, mix in the eggs until combined.

  5. Pour the batter onto a floured dish and let it cool completely.

Fry and serve

  1. Cut the cooled mixture into pieces.

  2. Fry the pieces in butter until golden brown.

  3. Sift sugar over the fried pieces.

  4. Serve with a sauce made of wine, sugar, nutmeg, and arrow-root.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Cream
Forms the rich custard base that sets into a thick batter.
Flour
Thickens the cream and gives the cooled batter enough body to hold its shape.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm when cooled.
Butter
Fries the pieces, adding fat for a golden, browned crust.

The step that matters

Let the batter simmer until the raw flour taste is gone. Flour starch must be cooked fully to thicken and lose its raw, pasty flavor. Undercooked flour leaves a floury taste in the finished pieces.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour, sugar, egg, butter, wine, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes