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Dessert

Angel Parfait

A chilled dessert made with a sugar syrup, whipped cream, egg whites, nuts, pineapple, and candied cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Angel Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup and meringue

  1. Cook sugar and water together without stirring until you can blow a bubble like for angel cake.

  2. Pour the syrup over the stiffly beaten egg whites and stir until cool.

Fold and freeze

  1. Whip the cream and fold it into the mixture.

  2. Add the nuts, pineapple, and cherries.

  3. Pack the mixture in ice and salt, using three parts ice to one part salt, and let it stand for four 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. Nuts + pineappletop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Double cream
Whipped to add richness and a light, airy body to the frozen dessert.
Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the dessert and helps it stay soft when frozen.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the parfait its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar and water syrup. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it is poured onto the egg whites. Stirring can cause crystallization, and undercooked syrup leaves the mixture too loose to set properly.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, nuts. 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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