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Dessert

Bavarian Cream

A chilled strawberry custard made with milk, sugar, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bavarian Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberries

  1. Pick and crush the strawberries with a silver spoon.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar over the strawberries.

  3. Let them stand for a few hours.

  4. Rub the strawberries through a fine sieve.

Make the cream base

  1. Put the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add the isinglass to the milk.

  3. Heat until the isinglass melts.

  4. Add sugar to taste.

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

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 main flavour and colour, and their juice carries the fruit into the cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and softens its tartness.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the cream that the isinglass sets.
Isinglass
Acts as a gelatine-like setting agent that firms the cream as it cools.

“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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