Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓
To Preserve Cream for Several Months
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Dissolve the sugar in a small amount of water over moderate heat.
Boil the sugar solution for about 2 minutes in an earthen vessel.
Combine and store
Add the new cream immediately and mix thoroughly while hot.
Allow the mixture to cool gradually.
Pour into a bottle and cork it carefully.
Store in a cool place, away from air.
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.
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Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- White sugar
- Sweetens the cream and thickens it into a preserved, spoonable mass as it cools.
- New cream
- Provides fat and richness, forming the body of the preserved mixture.
The step that matters
Add the cream while the sugar syrup is hot and mix thoroughly. Mixing the cream into the hot syrup helps it blend evenly before cooling. If the mixture is not fully combined, parts may separate or set unevenly during cooling and storage.
“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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