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Dessert

Cream

A layered dessert made from egg yolk, milk, gelatin, and colored with cochineal or spinach-green.

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

Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Prepare a cream by mixing the yolks of 8 eggs with 1 quart of milk and 9 sheets of softened gelatine.

  2. Sweeten to taste and add your choice of essence.

  3. Divide the mixture into three basins; color one red with cochineal and another green with spinach-green.

  4. Keep the basins in a bain-marie while adding color and until used.

Layer and set

  1. Pack a shaped mold in ice and pour in the red cream to a depth of ½ inch.

  2. Add a similar thickness of the plain cream, then the green cream, allowing each layer to set before adding the next.

  3. Continue layering until the mold is full or all ingredients are used.

  4. Let the whole set until firm, dip the mold in lukewarm water, and turn the cream out onto a cold dish to serve.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Egg + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

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

  5. Milk + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Milk and sugar 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help the cream thicken and set as it cools.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid cream so each layer holds its shape when turned out.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream and gives it a soft, smooth texture.

The step that matters

Allowing each layer to set before adding the next. If a layer is still liquid when the next is poured on, the layers will blend at the edges and lose their clean separation. Gelatine needs time to firm the layer fully before the next one is added.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, 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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