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Dessert

Pistachio Cream

A chilled pistachio cream dessert made with pistachio paste, thick cream, sugar, brandy, and floral water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistachio Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nut paste

  1. Blanch and peel the pistachio nuts.

  2. Pound the nuts to a smooth paste with a little rose or orange-flower water.

Make the cream

  1. Stir the paste into the thick cream.

  2. Add the sugar and brandy, and stir over gentle heat until just before boiling.

  3. Pour into a glass dish or glasses and let cool.

  4. Garnish with a few blanched pistachios cut into strips.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pistachio + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together135 recipes

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

  4. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Brandy + rosetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together560 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachio nuts
Provide the main flavour and the pale green colour of the cream.
Thick cream
Supplies fat and body, giving the cream its rich, smooth texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the nutty flavour.
Brandy
Adds aroma and a warm note to the finished cream.

The step that matters

Stir over gentle heat until just before boiling. Cream can scorch or separate if it boils hard, and the sugar and brandy need only gentle warming to dissolve and blend evenly. Heating slowly keeps the texture smooth.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pistachio, cream, sugar, brandy, rose):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, cream, sugar, brandy, rose. 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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