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A Trifle

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break Naples biscuits, macaroons, and ratafia cakes into pieces and layer them in a dish.

  2. Wet the layered biscuits with sack.

  3. Make a boiled custard with cream and sugar, then let it cool and pour it over the biscuits.

  4. Top with a syllabub and garnish with flowers, ratafia cakes, and currant jelly.

  5. For an alternative, moisten three large macaroons with white wine in a dish.

  6. Rub sugar over the lemon rind to infuse flavor, then mix it with cream.

  7. Froth the cream and set aside some for topping.

  8. In a pot, combine the remaining cream, cinnamon, beaten egg yolks, and sugar, and heat gently until thickened.

  9. Pour the thickened mixture over the macaroons, let it cool, then add the frothed cream on top and decorate with sweetmeats.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Biscuit + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, wine, cream, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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