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Dessert

Arrowroot Creams

A custard dessert made with arrowroot, powdered sugar, egg yolk, milk, lemon peel, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Creams

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a small amount of milk to form a smooth paste and add the egg yolk.

  2. In a saucepan, boil the remaining milk with the powdered sugar, lemon peel, and cinnamon.

  3. Pour the boiling milk mixture over the arrowroot paste, stirring continuously until nearly cold.

  4. Transfer the mixture into custard glasses and set aside.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as it cools.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps give the custard a creamy body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and dissolves easily in the hot milk.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling milk over the arrowroot paste while stirring continuously. Arrowroot thickens as it is heated in liquid and then sets as it cools. Stirring while adding the hot milk keeps the starch evenly dispersed so it does not clump into lumps.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

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