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Dessert

Cheese Cream and Marmalade

A creamy dessert made by boiling cream, adding marmalade and lemon peel, then setting with rennet and serving with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Cheese Cream and Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Boil the cream in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in the marmalade and chopped lemon peel.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool until lukewarm.

Set and serve

  1. Add rennet to the mixture and stir gently.

  2. Serve topped with pounded sugar.

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

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and sugar 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

Cream
Provides fat and richness, forming the body of the dessert.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the cream, setting it into a soft, sliceable curd.
Marmalade
Adds sweetness and bitter citrus acidity that flavour the set cream.

The step that matters

Add rennet at lukewarm temperature. Rennet works best at lukewarm temperatures; if the mixture is too hot the enzyme can be weakened or destroyed, and if it is still hot the cream may not set evenly. Stir gently so the curd forms without breaking up.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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