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Apricot Bavarian Cream

A chilled apricot custard made with gelatine, eggs, lemon, and sherry or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apricot Bavarian Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in a little cold water for about 10 minutes.

Make the custard

  1. Mix the lemon juice and rind, sherry or syrup, sugar, and egg yolks in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over gentle heat until the mixture thickens, stirring vigorously.

  3. Add the soaked gelatine and stir until thoroughly dissolved.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Line a mold with sponge fingers and gently pour in the mixture.

  3. Leave until firm.

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. Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together173 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the cream so it holds its shape when chilled and unmoulded.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard, and whipped whites lighten the mixture.
Apricot pulp
Provides the main apricot flavour and body to the cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the acidity of the lemon and apricot.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard gently while stirring. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but too much heat or too little stirring can scramble them, leaving lumps instead of a smooth base for the gelatine.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, egg, sherry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, egg, sherry, sugar. 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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