Skip to main content
Dessert

Almond Cream

A chilled almond custard made with almonds, milk, cream, sugar, and almond extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Almond Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almond cream

  1. Prepare the almonds by removing their skins.

  2. Blend the almonds with ½ pint of sweet milk until smooth.

  3. Stir the almond paste into 3 pints of sweet cream and add ½ pound of loaf sugar.

  4. Boil the mixture in a porcelain kettle.

Flavour and freeze

  1. Once cooled, add a little almond extract and adjust sweetness with more sugar if needed.

  2. Freeze the mixture until set.

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. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Almond + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Provide the main nutty flavour and a smooth, thick body when blended.
Sweet cream
Supplies fat and richness, giving the frozen mixture a creamy texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the texture of the frozen cream.
Sweet milk
Thins the blended almonds so they mix smoothly into the cream.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture. Boiling the almond and cream mixture thickens it and cooks the raw almond flavour. Heating it too hard or too long can scorch the dairy or make it separate, so it should be kept at a controlled boil and watched closely.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

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

More almond cream recipes

Cake 41Soup 9Pudding 7Sauce 7Burnt 6Filling 5 See all 69 →

You might also like

Almond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipesCoconut Almond CakeCoconut Almond Cake17 recipes