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Dessert

Another Red Currant or Pink Cream

A pink custard-like dessert made with red currant juice, powdered sugar, lemon juice, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Another Red Currant or Pink Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Squeeze ¾ pint of juice from ripe red currants.

  2. Add ¼ pound of powdered sugar and the juice of 1 lemon to the currant juice.

  3. Stir this mixture into 1½ pints of cream.

  4. Whisk until the mixture is thick.

Serve

  1. Serve in a glass dish or jelly glasses.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Red currant juice
Provides the tart fruit flavour and the pink colour of the cream.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and dissolves easily into the cold juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the currant flavour and balances the sweetness.
Cream
Provides fat that whisks into a thick, smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Whisk until the mixture is thick. Cream thickens as its fat globules trap air and partly clump together. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overwhipping past the stiff stage can turn it grainy or buttery.

Swap the red currant

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

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

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

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