Crème brûlée

This has been an immensely popular dish for the past ten years. It is another the French like to think of as theirs, when in fact it originated in the sixteenth century in the UK as burnt cream and in Spain in the eighteenth as ‘crema catalana’. The crème brulée’s eggy neutrality and textural uniformity has been used as a base for all sorts of imaginative variations, sweet and savoury. One of the most famous, a contemporary foie gras version on a bed of cranberries, pears and walnuts, is we