Skip to main content
Dessert

Floating Islands

A custard base topped with meringue islands, optionally garnished with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,475 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Floating Islands

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the yolks of five eggs and the whites of two until light.

  2. Sweeten with five tablespoons of sugar and add flavoring.

  3. Stir into a quart of scalded milk and cook until thickened.

  4. Cool and pour into a glass dish.

Make and set the islands

  1. Whip the remaining three egg whites to stiff peaks, adding three tablespoons of sugar and a little flavoring.

  2. Place this froth over a shallow dish of boiling water to cook it with steam.

  3. Drop spoonfuls of the froth over the custard, spacing them apart.

  4. Optionally, add a teaspoonful of currant jelly on top of each island.

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. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they cook and give it richness and colour.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form the light, airy floating islands.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which thickens when cooked with the yolks.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and the meringue, and helps the whites hold their stiff peaks.

The step that matters

Cooking the froth over boiling water. Steaming the meringue gently sets it through without the surface browning or deflating. Cooking the custard only until thickened matters too, since overheated egg yolks can curdle.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes