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Dessert

Mock Strawberries and Cream

A chilled fruit dessert made with peaches and apples, sugar, water, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Mock Strawberries and Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the peaches and apple.

  2. Cut the peaches and apple into pieces the size of a large strawberry.

  3. Layer the peach pieces and apple pieces alternately in a dish.

  4. Cover the top with a layer of crushed sugar.

  5. Pour 2 to 3 tablespoons of cold water over the fruit.

Macerate and serve

  1. Let the mixture stand for about 2 hours.

  2. Mix the peaches and apples together and let stand for 1 hour longer.

  3. Serve with or without cream.

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. Peach + appletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Peach + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together721 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit body and sweet, fragrant flavour that imitates strawberries.
Apple
Adds firm texture and tartness so the fruit holds its pieces when standing.
Crushed sugar
Draws juice out of the fruit through osmosis, creating a syrup around the pieces.

The step that matters

Layering the sugar and letting the fruit stand. Sugar must cover the fruit so it can draw out juice gradually; standing lets the sugar dissolve and the syrup form. Too little standing time leaves the fruit dry and the syrup thin.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar, cream. 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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