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Dessert

Floating Island

A dessert of whipped cream topped with a frothy apple-based mousse.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Floating Island

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Floating Island

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cream

  1. Mix the cream, raisin wine, lemon juice, orange-flower water, and sugar in a dish.

Make and serve the froth

  1. Prepare a froth by scalding the apple, pulping it through a sieve, and mixing it with beaten egg whites and sugar.

  2. Add the orange-flower water to the froth mixture and beat until frothy.

  3. Serve the froth on top of the cream or a custard, optionally coloring it with beetroot or jelly.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Wine + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Thin cream
Forms the rich, fatty base that the light froth sits on.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they trap air and give the froth its light, airy structure.
Sharp apple
Its pulp adds body and a tart fruit flavour to the froth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet cream and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and the froth, and helps stabilise the beaten whites.

The step that matters

Beating the froth. Egg whites only hold air as a stable foam if they are beaten properly and kept free of grease. Under-beaten whites collapse on the cream, and overheated pulp can start to cook the whites before they are whipped.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, wine, lemon, orange, sugar, egg, apple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, wine, lemon, orange, sugar, egg, apple. 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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