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Dessert

Fruit Parfait, with Marshmallows

A chilled dessert made from marshmallows, fruit juice, sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, whipped cream, and served with maraschino cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Fruit Parfait, with Marshmallows

Ingredients

Directions

Make the marshmallow base

  1. Mince and melt the marshmallows in the hot fruit juice.

  2. Boil the water and sugar until it threads, then stir it into the beaten egg whites.

  3. Add the melted marshmallows and lemon juice, and beat until cold.

Finish and serve

  1. Fold in the whipped cream and freeze as directed for parfait.

  2. Serve with Maraschino cherries as a sauce.

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

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

  2. Cherry + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Cherry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Marshmallows
Melt into the juice to create a sweet, stabilizing base for the parfait.
Egg whites
Beaten with hot syrup to form a foam that gives the parfait airy structure.
Heavy cream
Whipped and folded in to add lightness and richness to the frozen texture.
Sugar
Cooked into a syrup that sweetens the mixture and helps it set smoothly.

The step that matters

Stir the hot syrup into the beaten egg whites. Hot sugar syrup cooks the egg white proteins as it is poured in while beating, creating a stable foam. Pouring too slowly or letting the whites deflate can leave the mixture dense and weepy.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, lemon, 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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