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Dessert

Yellow Parfait

A chilled custard dessert made with egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Yellow Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Beat the egg yolks until thick.

  2. Boil the sugar in the water for 5 minutes, then add it to the egg yolks.

  3. Return the mixture to a double boiler and cook until it coats the back of a spoon.

  4. Strain the mixture and beat until cold.

Finish and freeze

  1. Fold in the whipped cream and flavoring until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into molds, pack with ice, and cover for 4 to 5 hours.

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

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

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they cook and give the parfait its rich texture.
Cream
Adds fat and body, giving the frozen parfait a smooth, light texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the parfait and lowers the freezing point, keeping it soft rather than hard.

The step that matters

Cooking the yolk mixture over a double boiler. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but they can scramble if the heat is too high. Cook gently until the mixture coats a spoon, so the base stays smooth and thick.

“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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