Crema Catalana

Catalonia's Saint Joseph's Day custard: milk infused with a cinnamon stick and lemon peel, thickened with egg yolks, and finished under a thin crust of sugar burnt with a hot iron

Origin: Barcelona & Catalonia, Spain

From the journey of Cinnamon.

Crema catalana is a custard of milk, egg yolks, and sugar, flavoured with a stick of cinnamon and a strip of lemon peel, set in shallow earthenware dishes, and served cold under a sheet of burnt sugar. In Catalonia it is also crema de Sant Josep, because it is the dessert of 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, when it is made in homes and pastry shops across the country. It is constantly compared with the French crème brûlée, and the comparison is useful mainly for the differences. Crema catalana is made with milk rather than cream; it is cooked on the hob, usually with a little starch as well as the yolks, rather than baked in a bain-marie; and it tastes of cinnamon and lemon where the French custard tastes of vanilla. That flavouring is the older one in Spain. Cinnamon and citrus are the aromatics of the late medieval Catalan kitchen, and milk cooked with egg appears in the Catalan recipe books of the fourteenth century. Catalans often say the crema itself is medieval. The books show its ancestors plainly enough, but a recipe under the modern name is much later, and the claim of unbroken descent is better held as tradition than as documented fact. The crust was traditionally made with a cremador, a flat iron disc on a long handle, heated in the fire until it glowed and pressed onto the sugar, which melts and blackens at the edges in a cloud of caramel smoke. Catalan speakers enjoy the coincidence that crema is not only cream but also the verb for 'it burns'. A kitchen blowtorch now does the work in most houses, but hardware shops in Catalonia still sell the irons.

Ingredients

Custard

  • 750 ml whole milk
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 1 strip lemon peel, pared without any white pith
  • 6 egg yolks
  • 125 g caster sugar
  • 25 g cornflour

To Finish

  • 6 tbsp caster sugar, for the crust

Method

  1. Pour 650 ml of the milk into a saucepan with the cinnamon stick and lemon peel. Bring slowly to just below the boil, then take off the heat, cover, and leave to infuse for 20 minutes.
  2. Whisk the remaining 100 ml of cold milk with the cornflour until smooth. In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until pale and thick, then whisk in the cornflour mixture.
  3. Lift the cinnamon and lemon peel out of the milk and warm it again briefly. Pour it onto the yolks in a thin stream, whisking all the time.
  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan over a low heat and stir constantly with a wooden spoon, always in the same direction, until the custard thickens and coats the back of the spoon, about 8 to 10 minutes. Take it off the heat the moment the first bubble breaks the surface.
  5. Pour the custard into six shallow earthenware dishes (the Catalan cassoletes) or ramekins. Leave to cool, then cover and chill for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
  6. Just before serving, sprinkle each custard with an even tablespoon of sugar. Burn it with a heated iron or a kitchen blowtorch until it melts into a thin, glassy, deep amber crust with a few darker spots.
  7. Serve at once, while the crust is hard and the custard beneath it is cold.

Notes

The traditional iron, the cremador or ferro de cremar, is heated directly on a gas flame for several minutes. Rest it on the sugar for a few seconds only; it scorches very fast. Some families replace part of the lemon peel with orange peel, and some finish with a dusting of ground cinnamon before the sugar is burnt. The custard, without its crust, keeps for two days in the fridge.

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