Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Creams, and Italian Creams

A chilled dessert made by mixing heavy cream with sweetened fruit juice or jam, optionally colored with cochineal and flavored with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,640 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Fruit Creams, and Italian Creams

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the sweetened juice of fresh fruit or fruit jam with the heavy cream.

  2. If using jam, gradually mix it with the cream until smooth.

  3. For fresh juice, ensure it is cold and strain to remove seeds or skins.

  4. For flavor, use ¼ pint of strawberry or raspberry jelly for 1 pint of cream.

  5. You can also use pureed fruits like apricots or nectarines, drained well, to mix with the cream.

  6. Add a few drops of prepared cochineal to deepen the color if desired.

  7. Add a little lemon juice to enhance the flavor.

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Heavy cream
Provides the rich, fatty base that gives the creams their body and mouthfeel.
Sweetened fruit juice or jam
Adds sweetness and fruit flavor to the cream.

The step that matters

Mixing jam into the cream. Jam added quickly can clump or deflate the cream's texture; adding it gradually lets it blend into a smooth, even mixture.

“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