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Dessert

Red Currant or Pink Cream

A chilled dessert made by mixing red currant juice, sugar, lemon juice, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Red Currant or Pink Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Squeeze the juice from the red currants until you have ¾ pint.

  2. Add ¼ pound of pounded loaf sugar and the juice of 1 lemon to the currant juice.

  3. Stir the mixture into 1½ pints of cream.

  4. Whisk until the cream is thick.

Serve

  1. Serve in a glass dish or jelly glasses.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Red currant juice
Provides the tart fruit flavour and pink colour of the cream.
Cream
Forms the body of the dish and thickens to a rich texture when whisked.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the tart currant juice and dissolves easily into the cream.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Whisk until the cream is thick. Cream thickens as its fat globules partially clump while air is beaten in. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overbeating can turn it grainy or buttery.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

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