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Dessert

Steeple Cream with Wine Sours

A chilled jelly cream made with calf's-foot jelly, egg yolks, orange juice, sugar, and topped with preserved wine sours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,046 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Steeple Cream with Wine Sours

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. In a mortar, pound the egg yolks until very fine.

  2. Warm the jelly and mix in the pounded egg yolks and orange juice.

  3. Add sugar until sweetened to your taste, stirring until it thickens like cream.

  4. Pour the mixture into jelly glasses and refrigerate overnight.

Serve

  1. The next day, turn out the jelly onto a dish and top with preserved wine sours.

  2. Garnish each serving with a sprig of myrtle before 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.

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. Orange + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,046 recipes

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

  2. Orange + myrtletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Wine + myrtletop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Calf's-foot jelly
Provides the gelatin that sets the cream into a firm, sliceable jelly.
Egg yolks
Add richness and body, thickening the mixture as it sets.
Seville orange juice
Adds acidity and bright flavour that balances the sugar and richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and adds to its body as it thickens.

The step that matters

Pounding the egg yolks until very fine. Fine, smooth yolks blend evenly into the warm jelly. Lumps of yolk would not dissolve and would leave a grainy texture in the set cream.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, wine, myrtle. 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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