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Floating Island

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Floating Island

Why it works: Wine and red currant work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 148 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Floating Island

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare a good riel custard and pour it into a trifle dish as the base.

  2. Layer the center with slices of sponge cake or French roll dipped in wine.

  3. Add a layer of calf's foot jelly, followed by more cake or roll, then red currant jelly.

  4. Continue layering alternately with preserves and cake, varying the colors.

  5. Shape the layers into an ascending pyramid, and top with whipped cream.

  6. Sprinkle with trifle comfits and small bits of colored preserves.

  7. Decorate the dish with paste ornaments or ratafia cakes.

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. Wine + red curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Wine + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Red currant + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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