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Dessert

Velvet Cream, an Excellent Family Receipt

A chilled dessert made with apricot jam, lemon juice, sherry, isinglass, water, cream, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Velvet Cream, an Excellent Family Receipt

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cover the bottom of a glass dish with apricot jam.

  2. Pour lemon juice and sherry over the jam.

Make the cream

  1. Dissolve isinglass in water and add to cream and sugar.

  2. Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Strain the mixture into a jug.

Set and serve

  1. When half cold, pour the cream over the sweetmeat from a height.

  2. Let it stand to cool and stiffen.

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. Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together173 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Isinglass
Sets the cream into a firm, wobbly structure as it cools.
Cream
Provides richness and a smooth, velvety texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon and sherry.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet cream.
Apricot jam
Forms the fruity base layer beneath the cream.

The step that matters

Pouring the cream over the jam from a height. Cream poured while it is only half cold and set gently keeps the jam layer beneath from being broken up or mixed in. Cooling the cream first also helps the layers separate cleanly as the isinglass sets.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sherry, cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sherry, cream, sugar. 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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