Skip to main content
Dessert

Floating Island

A chilled dessert of thin cream and raisin wine topped with a frothy raspberry or currant jelly mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Floating Island

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Floating Island

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cream

  1. Mix the cream, raisin wine, lemon juice, orange‑flower water, and sugar in a dish.

Make the froth and serve

  1. Top the mixture with a froth made from raspberry or currant jelly.

  2. Beat the egg whites with sugar and orange‑flower water until frothy.

  3. Serve the froth on raspberry cream or custard.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  3. Orange + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together521 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into foam, their trapped air gives the light, floating topping its structure.
Thin cream
Forms the rich, creamy base that the lighter froth sits on.
Raisin wine
Adds fruity, aromatic flavor to the cream base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and sweetness.
Raspberry or currant jelly
Provides sweetness, fruit flavor and color to the froth.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps stabilize the whipped egg white foam.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until frothy. Egg whites must be beaten enough to trap air in a stable foam; underbeaten whites stay runny and won't hold the topping, while overbeaten whites turn dry and grainy and collapse.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, wine, lemon, orange, sugar, raspberry, egg. 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.

More floating island recipes

Apple 3Strawberry 3 See all 214 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesRaspberry JamRaspberry Jam150 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes