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Dessert

Steeple Cream

A chilled dessert made from almond cream blended with a gelatinous mixture of ivory and harts-horn shavings, sweetened and flavored with amber.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Steeple Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Combine ivory shavings and harts-horn shavings in a stone bottle.

  2. Fill the bottle with water and add gum-arabic and gum-tragacanth.

  3. Seal the bottle tightly and place it in a pot of water with hay at the bottom.

  4. Let it stand for 6 hours, then remove and let it sit for 1 hour before opening.

  5. Strain the mixture to obtain a strong jelly.

Make the cream

  1. Blend blanched almonds with thick cream, let it sit, then strain.

  2. Mix the strained cream with the jelly and heat until scalding hot.

  3. Sweeten with double-refined sugar to taste, then remove from heat and add a little amber.

Mold and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into small high molds and let it cool.

  2. Once cooled, turn out the creams and serve with cold whipped cream.

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 + 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

Ivory shavings
Form the gelling base that sets the jelly.
Harts-horn shavings
Provide gelling strength so the jelly holds its shape when turned out.
Blanched almonds
Add nutty flavour and body to the cream.
Thick cream
Provides richness and fat for a smooth, soft texture.
Gum-arabic
Adds body and helps stabilise the jelly.

The step that matters

Heating the cream and jelly mixture. Heating until scalding hot must be done gently after combining, because overheating can break the cream and weaken the set of the gelatinous jelly. Removing it from heat before adding the amber keeps its aroma intact.

Swap the almond

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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