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Dessert

Arrowroot

A warm or chilled dessert made from egg, arrowroot, water or milk, sweetened and optionally flavored with brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the egg and separate the yolk and white.

  2. Whip the yolk and white to a stiff froth.

  3. Mix the yolk with arrowroot and a little water until smooth.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour the mixture slowly into ½ cup of boiling water, stirring constantly.

  2. Let it simmer until jelly-like.

  3. Sweeten to taste and add French brandy if desired.

  4. Stir in the frothed egg white and serve hot in winter.

  5. In summer, chill first on ice before stirring in the beaten white.

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. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Brandy + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Milk + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a jelly-like set as it heats and simmers.
Egg
The frothed white adds lightness, and the yolk helps enrich the jelly's texture.

The step that matters

Pouring the arrowroot mixture into boiling water. Pour slowly while stirring constantly so the starch disperses evenly instead of clumping. Lumps form if the starch hits the hot liquid all at once, and they cannot be fixed later.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, arrowroot, milk, brandy):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, arrowroot, milk, brandy. 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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