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Dessert

Mock Cream

A sweet custard-like dessert made with milk, sugar, flour, eggs, and lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mock Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Place the milk in a pan of hot water on the stove.

  2. Mix the flour, salt, and sugar together.

  3. Stir the mixture into the milk, stirring frequently.

  4. When the water boils, pour in the beaten eggs, stirring briskly for about a minute until light and foamy.

Flavor and cool

  1. Flavor with lemon.

  2. Let cool before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Starch thickens the milk as it heats, giving the cream body.
Eggs
Egg proteins set on heating, adding thickness and richness to the cream.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the thickeners set into a creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the set texture of the cream.

The step that matters

Pouring in the beaten eggs. Stirring briskly while the eggs go in spreads them evenly through the hot mixture, so they thicken smoothly instead of clumping or scrambling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, flour, 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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