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Dessert

Ratafia Cream

A custard dessert flavored with ratafia, mountain wine, lemon juice, and brandy, thickened with egg yolks and sweetened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Brandy and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,427 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Ratafia Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the laurel, peach, or nectarine leaves in 1 pint of cream.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  3. Add 3 beaten and strained egg yolks, sugar, and 1 tablespoon of brandy, stirring quickly.

  4. Scald the mixture until thick, stirring constantly.

Finish and serve

  1. In another bowl, mix ½ cup ratafia, ½ cup mountain wine, lemon juice, and enough sugar to taste.

  2. Beat the mixture with a whisk and pour it into glasses.

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. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

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

  3. Laurel + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Laurel + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,595 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the rich body of the custard and carries the leaf aroma.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they set when gently heated, giving a smooth texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet, rich custard.
Ratafia
Adds almond-like fruit flavour and aroma to the finished cream.

The step that matters

Scald the mixture until thick, stirring constantly. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overheating makes them scramble and curdle the cream. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly so the custard thickens smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against laurel, cream, egg, sugar, brandy, wine. 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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