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Dessert

Cream Fondant

A sugar fondant made by dissolving sugar in water, cooking to 238°F, adding lemon juice, cooling, then creaming.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Fondant

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the sugar

  1. Dissolve the sugar in water and cook to 238°F (114°C).

  2. Pour the mixture onto a dampened slab.

Add lemon, cool and cream

  1. Squeeze the juice of 8 lemons over the batch.

  2. Let it cool completely.

  3. Cream the mixture as usual.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Sugar
Forms the bulk of the fondant, and its fine crystals give the smooth, soft texture once creamed.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that partly breaks down sucrose, helping keep the fondant smooth and less grainy.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar to 238°F (114°C). The final temperature sets how much water remains in the syrup. Cooking too little leaves a soft fondant that will not hold its shape, while cooking too far makes it stiff and hard to cream.

“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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