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Dessert

Ratafia Cream

A chilled almond cream dessert made with bitter almonds, sugar, 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 ↓

Ratafia Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almond paste

  1. Blanch the bitter almonds and beat them with 1 teaspoon of water in a marble mortar.

  2. Rub the paste with 2 ounces of lump sugar.

Make the cream

  1. Simmer the mixture with 1 cup of cream for 10 minutes.

  2. Combine this with 1 quart of cream and strain.

  3. Chill the mixture before serving.

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. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Bitter almonds
Provide the characteristic bitter almond aroma and flavour that defines the cream.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and helps grind the almonds into a smooth paste.
Cream
Gives the dessert its rich fat content, body and smooth texture.

The step that matters

Simmer the almond mixture with the cream. Gentle simmering draws flavour from the almond paste into the cream. Boiling hard or simmering too long can scorch the cream or cause it to reduce and turn grainy, so keep the heat low and watch the pan.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Hazelnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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