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Dessert

Parfait Aux Fruits

A layered gelatin dessert with peaches, lemon, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and peach work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Parfait Aux Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Combine cold water, gelatin, and sugar in a bright tin and let sit on the back of the stove for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add the grated rind and juice of the lemons and sherry.

Layer the parfait

  1. Pour an inch layer of the jelly into the mold on ice.

  2. Let it set.

  3. Add a layer of peaches on top of the jelly.

  4. Add another layer of jelly.

  5. Let it set.

  6. Repeat layering until all jelly is used.

  7. Keep remaining jelly warm until needed.

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. Lemon + peachtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + peachtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

Gelatin
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly that holds the fruit layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the tartness of the lemon and sherry.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma from the rind and juice to the jelly.
Sherry
Adds flavour and aroma to the jelly.
Peaches
Provide fruit flavour, sweetness and texture between the jelly layers.

The step that matters

Letting each jelly layer set before adding the next. If a layer is not firm, the next layer of warm jelly or fruit will mix into it and blur the distinct stripes. Gelatin sets as it cools, so each layer needs time on the ice to firm before the next is poured.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, peach. 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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