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Drink

Soda Cream

A chilled beverage made from a sugar‑egg‑flour syrup flavored with lemon and tartaric acid, served with cream and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Soda Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, mix together sugar, egg, flour, cold water, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat the mixture until it scalds, then remove from heat.

  3. Add tartaric acid and flavoring, stirring well.

  4. Bottle the syrup and keep it on ice.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, put 2 tablespoons of cream in a glass.

  2. Fill the glass half full with cold water and add baking soda.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup.
Egg
Adds richness and helps thicken the syrup as it heats.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so the syrup has more body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the syrup.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity that reacts with baking soda to produce fizz.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the syrup to release carbon dioxide bubbles.

The step that matters

Adding baking soda to the glass. Baking soda fizzes only when it meets acid, so it should be added at serving time. Adding it early lets the carbon dioxide escape and leaves the drink flat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, 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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