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Dessert

Mock Strawberries and Cream

A chilled fruit dessert made with sliced peaches and apples, sugar, and water, served with or without cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Mock Strawberries and Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the peaches and apple.

  2. Cut the peaches and apple into pieces the size of a large strawberry.

  3. Layer the peach and apple pieces alternately in a dish.

Macerate and serve

  1. Cover the top with a layer of crushed sugar.

  2. Pour 2-3 tablespoons of cold water over the fruit.

  3. Let the mixture stand for about 2 hours.

  4. Mix the peaches and apples together and let stand for 1 hour longer.

  5. Serve with or without 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. Peach + appletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

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

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit body and sweet, fragrant flavor that imitates strawberries.
Eating apple
Adds firmness and tartness that keeps the fruit pieces from tasting flat.
Crushed sugar
Draws juice out of the fruit, creating a syrup while sweetening the dish.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture stand. Sugar needs time to draw liquid out of the fruit through osmosis. Standing for the full 3 hours builds the syrup that gives the dish its strawberry-like juiciness.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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