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To Make Clotted Cream

Clotted cream is made by curdling heavy cream with rennet and fruit juice, then draining and sweetening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 815 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

To Make Clotted Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of rennet to 1 quart of heavy cream.

  2. When it curdles, carefully break it with a silver spoon.

  3. Drain the curds in a sieve for a little while.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a China soup plate.

  2. Pour over some heavy cream mixed with fruit juice. Sweeten to your liking.

  3. Garnish with strawberry leaves.

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. Raspberry + strawberrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Cream + strawberrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,525 recipes

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

  4. Cream + raspberrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,332 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + strawberrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream
Provides the rich fat base that thickens into the clotted cream texture.
Rennet
Enzyme that curdles the cream so it separates into soft curds.

The step that matters

Breaking the curds gently with a silver spoon. Curds that are broken roughly or stirred hard can become grainy and lose the soft, spreadable texture; gentle handling keeps them tender while the cream sets.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberrythe original
  3. Bananafits about as well
  4. Pineapplefits about as well

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