Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Cream

A chilled gelatin dessert made from cooked apples, sugar, lemon, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Apple Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the apples.

  2. Place apples in a saucepan with sugar, lemon rind, and lemon juice; simmer gently until soft.

  3. Pass the cooked apples through a sieve into a bowl and chill until cold.

Make the cream

  1. Whisk the cream until firm.

  2. Dissolve gelatine in a little boiling water and mix with the apple pulp.

Set and serve

  1. If desired, color a portion with cochineal, pour into a mold, and chill until set.

  2. Once firm, add the white portion on top.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Apple + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,089 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Cooking apples
Provide the bulk of the pulp, whose soft texture and tartness form the base of the cream.
Gelatine
Sets the apple pulp so the cream holds its shape when chilled and turned out.
Cream
Whisked until firm, it adds richness and a light, airy texture to the set dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and balances their tartness.

The step that matters

Pass the cooked apples through a sieve and chill until cold. Cooked apple pulp must be smooth and fully cooled before the gelatine and whipped cream are added; warm pulp can melt the cream's structure and cause the gelatine to set unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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.

More apple cream recipes

Pie 4Cake 3Filling 3 See all 64 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes