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Dessert

Strawberry Float

A chilled dessert of crushed strawberries topped with a frothy egg‑white mixture and a warm custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Strawberry Float

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Strawberry Float

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberry foam

  1. Crush the strawberries.

  2. Separate the egg whites from the yolks.

  3. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth and gradually add the powdered sugar.

  4. Mix in the crushed strawberries while beating until the mixture is a stiff cream.

  5. Place the mixture in a glass dish and set it on ice.

Make the custard sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks with ½ cup of milk.

  2. Heat the remaining milk in a double boiler until hot.

  3. Stir in the beaten yolks and cook until thick like cream.

  4. Add salt, sugar, and vanilla to taste, then cool on ice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the frothy strawberries when serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Strawberries
Provide the fruit flavour and colour, and bulk out the stiff strawberry cream.
Eggs
Whites whip into a stiff foam; yolks thicken the milk sauce as they cook.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the foam and dissolves easily into the whipped whites.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard sauce, which thickens when the yolks are cooked into it.

The step that matters

Cooking the yolks into the milk. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with gentle heat. If the mixture gets too hot or is cooked too fast, the yolks can curdle or scramble, so the sauce should be stirred steadily over a double boiler until it coats a spoon.

“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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