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Dessert

Fruit Creams, Amd Italian Creams

A chilled dessert made by flavoring cream with fruit juice or jam, optionally colored with cochineal, and lightly whipped.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and peach work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fruit Creams, Amd Italian Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Flavor the cream

  1. Mix the cream with the sweetened juice or fruit jelly/jam to flavor it.

  2. Add a few drops of cochineal for color if desired.

  3. If using jam, mix it gradually with the cream.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Crush the strawberries.

  2. Sprinkle the crushed strawberries with sugar to extract juice.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve to remove seeds or skin.

  4. Simmer other fruits in a little syrup.

  5. Drain the simmered fruits.

  6. Drain in a fine sieve for later use.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix the drained fruits with cold cream.

  2. Add lemon juice to all mixtures.

  3. Whisk the mixture lightly to a froth.

  4. Remove the froth with a skimmer.

  5. Serve immediately in glasses.

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. Lemon + peachtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  2. Cream + peachtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together721 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Cream
Forms the rich, smooth body and whips into a light froth.
Fruit jelly or jam
Adds concentrated fruit flavor and sweetness to the cream.
Strawberries
Provide fruit flavor and juice once crushed and sugared.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the fruit and cream.

The step that matters

Whisk the mixture lightly to a froth. Cream thickens and turns grainy or buttery if overwhipped, while underwhipping leaves it too loose to hold a froth. Whisk gently and stop once soft peaks form so the air stays light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, peach. 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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