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Dessert

Cold Sweet Entremets

A chilled strawberry dessert made with clear wine jelly, cream, chartreuse, angelica, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and angelica work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 237 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Cold Sweet Entremets

Ingredients

Directions

Decorate the mould

  1. Mask a fancy or plain mould with jelly.

  2. Pick out a few of the best strawberries, halve them and remove the stalks.

  3. Substitute small strips of angelica for the stalks.

  4. Decorate the bottom and sides of the mould with these.

  5. Mask well with jelly to keep the fruit firm and in position.

Make the filling

  1. Cut the remaining strawberries into slices.

  2. Let the jelly be cold and liquid.

  3. Add the sliced fruit.

  4. Melt the gelatine in a little jelly.

  5. Strain it into the mixture.

  6. Whip the cream and stir it in.

  7. Add the liqueur.

  8. Stir over ice until it begins to set.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into the decorated mould.

  2. Stand it on ice until firm.

  3. Turn out and 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.

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 + angelicatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together237 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Wine + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Wine + angelicatop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and, when sliced, the visible fruit in the set dessert.
Clear wine jelly
Forms the clear, sweet, set body that holds the fruit in place.
Cream
Adds richness and a soft, light texture to the filling.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture so the dessert holds its shape when turned out.
Chartreuse
Adds herbal, aromatic flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Stir over ice until it begins to set. Gelatine sets as it cools, so the mixture must thicken just enough to hold the fruit without setting in lumps or firm layers. Stirring over ice cools it evenly, and pouring too late makes the filling unable to settle smoothly into the mould.

Swap the angelica

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, 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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