Skip to main content
Dessert

Grapefruit a LA Russe

A chilled grapefruit dessert topped with sweetened whipped cream and garnished with cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Grapefruit a LA Russe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapefruit

  1. Wash grapefruits and cut in half crosswise.

  2. Remove seeds and tough portions.

  3. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and chill in the refrigerator.

Make the cream and serve

  1. Beat cream until stiff, then add powdered sugar, salt, and maraschino.

  2. Using a pastry bag, pipe a border of cream on top of each half in a square shape.

  3. Garnish each corner with a glacé or maraschino cherry.

  4. Serve in double cocktail glasses filled with crushed ice.

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. Grapefruit + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Grapefruit + creamtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream
Whipped into stiff foam that holds its shape as a border on top of the fruit.
Granulated sugar
Sprinkled on the fruit to draw out juice and lightly sweeten the grapefruit.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the whipped cream and dissolves easily into it.

The step that matters

Beat the cream until stiff. Cream must be whipped just to stiff peaks so it holds its piped square shape; overbeating turns it grainy and can cause it to separate into butter.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Grapefruitthe 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes