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Dessert

Red Currant or Pink Cream

A chilled dessert made from red currants, sugar, and heavy cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Red Currant or Pink Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove currants from the stalks and place them in a jar.

  2. Cover the jar and set it in a pan of cold water.

  3. Boil the jar in the water for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the juice through a sieve and sweeten it with pounded loaf sugar.

Make the cream

  1. Once cold, mix 1 pint of the juice with 4 cups of heavy cream.

  2. Whisk the mixture until thick and serve in a deep glass dish.

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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the tart juice that gives the cream its flavour and pink colour.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the currant juice to balance its acidity.
Heavy cream
Provides fat that whisks into a thick, rich texture.

The step that matters

Whisk the mixture until thick. The juice must be cold before mixing, and whisking must stop at thick. Cream whisked too far turns grainy and can separate, while warm juice thins the cream and prevents it from thickening properly.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe 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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