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Dessert

Nut Cream

A chilled hazelnut cream made with milk, eggs, sugar, gelatin, and ground hazelnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and hazelnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 464 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Scald the hazelnut kernels, scrape off the skins, and pound them finely.

  2. Boil half of the milk with the sugar.

  3. Beat the yolks with the remaining milk and add to the boiling milk, then boil again.

  4. Add the dissolved gelatine and a pinch of salt.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a basin and let it cool, stirring until it begins to thicken.

  2. Fold in the stiffly whisked egg whites and the pounded nuts.

  3. Pour into a glass dish and garnish with nuts.

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. Flour + hazelnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together464 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the cream is built on.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they cook, and whisked whites lighten the cream.
Hazelnut kernels
Provide the main nutty flavour and a fine, pounded texture throughout the cream.
Gelatine
Sets the cream so it holds its shape when chilled.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the richness of the nuts and eggs.
Flour
Helps thicken the custard so it is less likely to run.

The step that matters

Adding the yolks to the boiling milk. Egg yolks can curdle or turn grainy if they meet very hot liquid too quickly. Blending them with some milk first and returning the mixture to the heat gently lets the yolks thicken smoothly into a custard.

Swap the hazelnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutthe original

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