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Dessert

Stone Cream

Stone Cream is a milk-based dessert thickened with arrowroot, sweetened with sugar, flavored with cloves and almonds, and garnished with jam, angelica, and glace cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stone Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jam

  1. Layer jam at the bottom of a glass dish.

Make the custard

  1. Mix arrowroot with a little cold milk until smooth.

  2. Boil the remaining milk and pour it over the arrowroot, stirring continuously.

  3. Return to the heat, add sugar, and simmer gently for 2–3 minutes.

  4. Stir in the essences and let the mixture cool, stirring occasionally.

Serve

  1. Pour the cooled mixture over the jam and garnish with angelica and cherries.

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. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together84 recipes

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

  3. Almond + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

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

  4. Arrowroot + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Arrowroot + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a smooth, creamy set.
Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, glossy cream as it heats.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the flavour of the essences.
Jam
Adds fruity sweetness and flavour under the set cream.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot into the boiling milk. Arrowroot can clump if added to hot liquid without constant stirring. Keep stirring as the milk is poured in so the starch disperses evenly and thickens into a smooth cream.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, arrowroot, almond, angelica):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, arrowroot, almond, angelica. 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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