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Dessert

Peaches and Apricots, with Cream

A chilled dessert of tinned peaches and apricots served with clotted cream, preserved cherries, and green angelica.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Peaches and Apricots, with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Place the fruit in a glass dish with the concave side facing up.

  2. Pour the syrup around the fruit.

  3. Use a teaspoon to remove any syrup that has settled in the fruit cups.

Top and decorate

  1. Take about ½ teaspoon of clotted cream and place it in the middle of each fruit cup.

  2. Top each cream dollop with a single preserved cherry.

  3. Chop a little green angelica and sprinkle it on the cream for decoration.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Apricot + angelicatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

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

  3. Syrup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Apricot + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Peach + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Clotted cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty texture that contrasts with the sweet fruit.
Syrup from the fruit
Adds moisture and sweetness to the fruit.

Swap the angelica

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, apricot, syrup, cream):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, apricot, syrup, 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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