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Dessert

Arrowroot Cream

A sweet cream made with arrowroot, milk, sugar, and jam or stewed fruit, finished with lemon essence and garnished with red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place jam or stewed fruit in a glass dish.

  2. Mix arrowroot with a little milk.

Make the cream

  1. Boil milk with sugar.

  2. Gradually pour in the arrowroot mixture, stirring for 2–3 minutes.

  3. Add essence of lemon and let cool slightly.

Serve

  1. Pour over the fruit or jam and garnish with red currant jelly.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + red curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, glossy cream when heated with stirring.
Milk
Forms the body of the cream once thickened.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the cream.
Jam or stewed fruit
Provides the fruit base and flavour under the cream.

The step that matters

Stirring in the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens when heated and must be stirred while it is added to the boiling milk, so it does not form lumps and thickens evenly.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, milk, sugar, lemon. 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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