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Dessert

Stone Cream

Stone Cream is a dessert made with arrowroot, milk, sugar, almond extract, jam, and garnished with dried cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stone Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Mix the arrowroot with enough cold milk to moisten well.

  2. Boil the milk and sugar together.

  3. Stir the arrowroot mixture into the boiling milk and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the almond extract when slightly cooled.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the jam spread in a glass dish.

  2. Garnish the top with dried cherries.

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 + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Arrowroot or cornflour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set cream when simmered.
Milk
Forms the body of the cream once thickened.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cream and softens its flavour.
Jam
Forms the sweet fruity layer beneath the cream.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot into the boiling milk. Starch thickens only when hot liquid is stirred while it boils. Adding it to cold milk or not stirring it evenly can cause lumps, and the cream may not thicken smoothly as it simmers.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Beetrootfits less well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, almond. 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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