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Dessert

Frozen Desserts

A chilled layered dessert made with whipped cream, ladyfingers, macaroons, sherry, nuts, and cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and mixed nuts work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 40 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Frozen Desserts

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Whip the cream and sweeten and flavor it to taste.

Assemble

  1. Fill the bottom of a mold with the whipped cream.

  2. Add a layer of ladyfingers, followed by another layer of cream.

  3. Top with mixed nuts, candied cherries, and crumbed macaroons.

  4. Cover with more cream.

Freeze

  1. Pack the mold in salt and ice for 2 hours.

  2. Ensure edges are protected from salt.

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 + mixed nutstop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Cream + sherrytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

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

  3. Cream + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

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

  4. Sherry + winetop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Sherry + mixed nutstop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Whipping cream
Whipped into air bubbles, it forms the light, creamy body of the frozen dessert.
Lady fingers
Soft sponge layers absorb moisture and add structure between the cream layers.
Macaroons
Crumbed macaroons add chewy texture and sweetness to the layers.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and flavor to the cream and the sponge layers.

The step that matters

Pack the mold in salt and ice for 2 hours.. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, so the mixture chills and freezes. Keeping salt away from the edges, as the record notes, prevents salt from seeping into the dessert and making its edges taste salty.

Swap the mixed nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cocoafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Mixed nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sherry, wine. 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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