Crème brûlée

A baked custard of cream, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla, chilled and then capped with a layer of sugar that is melted under a flame into a glass-thin sheet of caramel: crème brûlée is the dessert whose whole point is the sound of a spoon cracking through the top. The French name dates from a 1691 cookbook by François Massialot, but the dish was being made in Cambridge in the same period as burnt cream, a tradition Trinity College still claims, and the Catalan crema catalana, thickened with cornflour and flavoured with lemon and cinnamon, is older than both. The modern restaurant version is a product of the 1980s, when the blowtorch and the shallow ramekin made the caramel lid reliable and the dessert spread to menus everywhere. The custard underneath is what separates a good one from a bad one; the caramel only decides whether it was finished properly.