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Dessert

Creme De Fraise a LA Bavaroise

A chilled strawberry Bavarian cream made with fresh strawberries, powdered sugar, lemon juice, heavy cream, clarified isinglass, and pounded ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Creme De Fraise a LA Bavaroise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberry base

  1. Place the strawberries into a basin and add powdered sugar.

  2. Crush the strawberries and sugar together, then add lemon juice.

  3. Rinse the mixture through a fine sieve.

Make the cream

  1. Whip the cream until stiff and fold it into the strawberry puree.

  2. Dissolve the clarified isinglass and stir it in to set the mixture.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and set it in pounded ice.

  2. Once set, turn out the cream as you would with other creams.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and lemon 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

Heavy cream
Whipped to stiff peaks, it adds air and a rich, light body to the cream.
Clarified isinglass
A gelatin-like setting agent that firms the mixture so it holds its shape when turned out.
Fresh strawberries
Provide the main flavour and, once crushed, the puree that gives the cream its colour and body.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and dissolves easily into their juice.

The step that matters

Folding the whipped cream into the puree. Stiff cream deflates if it is stirred rather than folded, losing the air that makes the dessert light. Folding gently keeps the bubbles intact.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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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