Name: Strawberries and Cream
Ingredients: fresh strawberries; powdered sugar; cream or condensed milk

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 ↓

Strawberries and Cream

Ingredients

fresh strawberries
powdered sugar
cream or condensed milk

Directions

Prepare

Pick over the strawberries carefully and wash them if dusty by pouring water over them in a colander.

Assemble and serve

Arrange the strawberries in a glass dish, sprinkling a thick layer of powdered sugar over them when the dish is half full.
Add another layer of powdered sugar on top just a few minutes before serving.
Cover the strawberries with cream or partially diluted condensed milk when serving.

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh strawberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and juice that the sugar draws out into a syrup.
Powdered sugar: Sweetens the berries and draws out their juices, softening them into a syrup.
Cream or condensed milk: Adds richness and fat, softening the acidity of the berries.

“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.