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Dessert

Pastry Cream

A sweet lemon-flavored custard thickened with crushed ratafias, served in puff pastry vol-au-vents.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pastry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Heat a gentle fire and combine the white sugar and rasped lemon rind in a saucepan.

  2. Stir well and add the crushed ratafias.

  3. Simmer for 6 to 8 minutes until thick, then pour into a basin.

  4. Add the butter and mix until smooth.

Make and serve the vol-au-vents

  1. Make small vol-au-vents using puff pastry.

  2. Glaze the edges of the vol-au-vents with fine sugar and melt with a red-hot salamander until it forms a pale glaze.

  3. Fill the hot pastry cream into the vol-au-vents and serve immediately.

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. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cream thicken as it simmers.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the cream.
Ratafias
Contribute a crushed almond-like flavour to the cream.

The step that matters

Simmering until thick. Simmering the cream for the stated time thickens it as the starch and egg-free mixture sets. Stopping too early leaves it runny, and cooking too long can make it stiff, so the cook should watch for the cream to coat a spoon.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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