Skip to main content
Dessert

Red Currant or Pink Cream

A chilled pink custard made from red currant juice and heavy cream, sweetened with pounded sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Red Currant or Pink Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove currants from the stalks and place them in a jar.

  2. Cover the jar and set it in a pan of cold water.

  3. Boil for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the juice through a sieve and sweeten with pounded sugar.

Make the cream

  1. Once cold, mix 1 pint of juice with 1 quart of cream.

  2. Whisk until thick and serve in a deep glass dish.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the tart juice that gives the cream its flavour and pink colour.
Heavy cream
Whisked, it traps air and thickens into the body of the dessert.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the tart currant juice so the cream tastes balanced.

The step that matters

Whisk until thick. Overwhipping heavy cream past soft peaks turns it grainy and eventually separates it into butter and liquid, so stop once it holds its shape.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

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

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes