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Dessert

To Make Pistachio Cream

A creamy pistachio dessert made by blending pistachios with brandy, cream, and egg yolks, then cooking until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Make Pistachio Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Remove the kernels from the pistachio nuts.

  2. Beat the nuts in a mortar with the brandy.

Make the cream

  1. Combine the nut mixture with the cream and beaten egg yolks in a saucepan.

  2. Cook gently over low heat until thickened.

Cool and serve

  1. Pour into a serving dish and let cool.

  2. Once cooled, garnish with small pieces of pistachio and serve.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Brandy + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Brandy + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  5. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavour and body of the cream once ground into the mixture.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fat-based texture to the finished cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as gentle heat sets the proteins, giving it a custard-like body.
Brandy
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour that complements the pistachios.

The step that matters

Cook gently over low heat until thickened. Egg yolks thicken by setting as their proteins heat. Too much heat or speed can curdle or scramble them, leaving a grainy texture instead of a smooth cream.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pistachio, brandy, cream, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, brandy, cream, egg. 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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