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Dessert

Custard Cream

A sweet custard thickened from milk, sugar, egg yolks, and spices, optionally flavored with brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Custard Cream

Why it works: Peach and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Custard Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with lemon peel, peach leaves, cinnamon, and sugar.

  2. Beat the egg yolks in a separate bowl.

  3. Strain the milk through a coarse sieve into the bowl with the egg yolks, mixing gradually.

  4. Simmer the mixture gently, stirring until it thickens, but remove from heat before it boils to prevent curdling.

Finish

  1. For added flavor, mix in a glass of brandy.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 the custard as they set with gentle heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg yolks thicken into a creamy custard.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the infused milk.

The step that matters

Simmer gently and remove from heat before boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if the custard boils, the proteins curdle and it turns grainy. Stirring steadily and pulling it off the heat as it thickens prevents this.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, peach, cinnamon, sugar, egg, brandy. 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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