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
Mix the cream, raisin wine, lemon juice, orange-flower water, and sugar in a dish.
Make the froth
For the froth, scald the codlin or apple, then pulp it through a sieve.
Beat the egg whites with sugar and orange-flower water until frothy.
Gradually mix in the pulp and beat until you have a large quantity of froth.
Serve
Serve the froth on raspberry cream.
Color the froth with jelly and serve on white cream.
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.
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Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together10,634 recipes
Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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Orange + appletop 7% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together2,230 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
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Wine + appletop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,207 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
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Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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 base of the dish, giving a rich, smooth body under the froth.
- Egg whites
- Whipped into a foam that gives the light, airy froth its structure.
- Raisin wine
- Adds flavour and liquid to the cream base.
- Codlin or sharp apple
- Pulp added to the beaten whites, adding body and a tart note to the froth.
The step that matters
Beating the egg whites to froth. Egg whites must be beaten until frothy and then combined gently with the pulp; under-beaten whites stay thin and collapse, while adding the pulp too roughly can deflate the foam and lose its volume.
Swap the apple
The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, raisin, wine, lemon, orange, sugar, egg):
- Vanillafits better
- Figfits better
- Raspberryfits about as well
- Applethe original
Fit is the average pairing score against cream, raisin, wine, lemon, orange, sugar, egg. 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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