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Dessert

Whipped Cream, and Cheese Like Snow

A frothy whipped cream garnished with preserved lemon pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Whipped Cream, and Cheese Like Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In an earthen dish, combine the cream, powdered sugar, gum tragacanth, and orange flower water.

Whip and shape

  1. Whip the cream with a willow rod until frothy.

  2. As the froth forms, remove it with a skimmer and shape it into a pyramid on a plate.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish the pyramid with pieces of preserved lemons and serve.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cream + orangetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Cream
Whips into a foam that holds its shape, forming the body of the dessert.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and dissolves easily into it without grittiness.
Gum tragacanth
Thickens the liquid and stabilizes the whipped froth so it holds its pyramid shape.

The step that matters

Removing the froth as it forms. Froth must be lifted off as it appears, since over-whipping turns cream grainy and collapses the foam, and the stabilizer only helps while the foam is still light.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

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