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Dessert

Angel Parfait

A frozen dessert made with a sugar syrup, egg whites, vanilla, lemon, sherry, and heavy cream, served with whipped cream and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Angel Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup and egg base

  1. Boil sugar and water until it spins a thread.

  2. Pour the syrup over the beaten egg whites.

  3. Beat the mixture until cold.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add lemon juice, vanilla, and sherry to the mixture.

  2. Fold in the well-beaten cream.

  3. Turn the mixture into molds, close securely, and pack in equal parts of crushed ice and salt.

  4. Allow to freeze for 3 to 4 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve in glasses topped with whipped cream and crushed pistachio nuts or candied violets.

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. Vanilla + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Vanilla + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the parfait its light, airy structure.
Heavy cream
Folded in whipped form to add richness and a soft, creamy texture after freezing.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, boiled with water, forms a syrup that stabilises the egg foam.

The step that matters

Pouring the syrup over the beaten egg whites. The syrup must be hot and at the thread stage so it cooks the egg white proteins slightly and creates a stable, glossy foam. Poured too cool or too slowly, the foam can deflate and the parfait will freeze heavy and dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, vanilla, cream, sherry, wine. 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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