Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Creams, and Italian Creams

A chilled dessert made by flavoring cream with fruit juice or jam, optionally colored with cochineal and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Fruit Creams, and Italian Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. For strawberries, crush the fruit and sprinkle sugar over it to extract juice.

  2. For other fruits like peaches or pineapples, simmer them in a little syrup, drain, and mix with cold cream.

  3. If using jam, gradually mix it with the cream and strain through a sieve to remove seeds or skins.

Make the cream

  1. Mix the cream with the sweetened juice of fresh fruit or fruit jelly/jam to flavor it.

  2. Add a few drops of prepared cochineal if a deeper color is desired.

  3. Add lemon juice to all mixtures.

  4. Whisk the blended ingredients lightly to create a froth, skimming off the foam as it rises.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately in glasses or drain in a fine sieve if desired.

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

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides richness and, when whisked, a light froth structure.
Fruit juice or jam
Supplies sweetness and fruit flavour to the cream.
Sugar
Draws juice out of strawberries and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Whisk the blended ingredients lightly. Cream whisked too hard can overwork its fat and turn grainy or buttery. Light whisking traps air for a froth while keeping the texture smooth, and skimming the foam as it rises keeps the cream clean.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes