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Dessert

Angel Parfait

A chilled dessert made with gelatin, egg whites, maraschino cherries, cream, pineapple, syrup, walnuts, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Angel Parfait

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak gelatine in 2 tablespoons of water for 5 minutes.

Make the syrup and egg whites

  1. Boil ½ cup water and ½ cup sugar until it reaches a soft ball stage.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the beaten egg whites and beat well.

  3. Add the soaked gelatine to the mixture.

Fold and set

  1. When the mixture begins to set, fold in the cream, fruit, syrup, and nuts.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Cream + syruptop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pineapple + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Pineapple + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together568 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the mixture so the parfait holds its shape when frozen or chilled.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they give the parfait its light, airy structure.
Cream
Adds richness and a soft, airy texture when folded in.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that cooks the egg whites.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavour against the soft base.

The step that matters

Pour the hot syrup over the egg whites while beating. Pouring the syrup slowly into beating whites cooks them partly and stabilises the foam. Pouring too fast or letting the whites go flat makes the mixture dense and weeping.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, pineapple, syrup, 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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