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Dessert

Pink Cream

A sweetened currant cream made by boiling currants, straining the juice, and mixing with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Pink Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the currant juice

  1. Strip currants from their stalks and place them in an earthen jar with a tight lid.

  2. Set the jar in a pan of boiling water and boil gently for 2 hours until the juice flows freely.

  3. Strain the juice through a fine sieve and sweeten with powdered sugar to taste.

Finish the cream

  1. Stir the currant juice into the cream and beat the mixture until it begins to thicken.

  2. Optionally, add lemon juice to the cream.

  3. Serve in a glass dish.

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. Red currant + curranttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  3. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

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

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

Red currants
Provide the main tart fruit flavour and the pink colour of the juice.
Cream
Provides richness and body, thickening as it is beaten.
Powdered white sugar
Sweetens the tart currant juice to taste.
Lemon juice
Adds extra acidity to brighten the flavour of the cream.

The step that matters

Beating the cream with the currant juice. Cream thickens only as its fat globules partly clump when beaten, so stop once it just begins to thicken; overbeating can turn it grainy or buttery.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red currant, sugar, currant, cream):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar, currant, 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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