The sweet satisfaction of a burnt Cambridge cream

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a Trinity or Cambridge burnt cream must taste as sweet as its French twin, the crème brûlée. The two cooked custard dishes are essentially identical: an egg yolk-rich baked custard served cold and topped with a layer of hard caramel.

Both are similar to the crema Catalana you find throughout Spain (known as ‘crema cremada’ in Catalan cuisine), but Catalana is made with milk rather than cream. It means it is lighter, and tends to have a thinner, paler caramel layer. Lemon or orange zest and a cinnamon stick are often used as flavouring for the Spanish pudding, whereas a burnt cream or crème brûlée is traditionally only flavoured with vanilla.

The British version comes from Trinity College, Cambridge. Rabble-rousers would have you believe that there’s a debate as to which came first, the Cambridge burnt cream or the crème brûlée, but that’s not reallytrue. The custard was first written about in French cookbooks and referred to as crème brûlée in 1691, although accounts suggest that the dish had been around for at least 60 years in England before the French got to it.

By 1879, it was being served regularly at Trinity, with the college crest branded into the caramelised top. Florence White, writing in Good Things in England, tells the story of an undergraduate there offering up the recipe – which she was told came from a country house in Aberdeenshire – only for the college kitchens to roundly reject it… until he became a fellow 30 years later, when suddenly his word had more sway, and it became the college’s signature dish.

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Julie Burchill

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The college itself lays no claim to the invention of the original burnt cream, stating baldly that ‘the story that crème brûlée itself was invented at the college almost certainly has no basis in fact’.