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Dessert

Caramel Ick Cream with Nuts

A frozen dessert made by sweetening cream, mixing caramel and milk, folding in nuts, and setting until half frozen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pecans and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 634 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Caramel Ick Cream with Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Sweeten the cream with 1 cup of sugar.

  2. In a double boiler, heat 1 pint of milk with 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch for 10 minutes.

  3. While still hot, add 1 cup of caramel to the milk mixture and strain it into the sweetened cream.

Freeze and finish

  1. When the cream is about half frozen, fold in 1 pint of chopped nuts.

Make the caramel

  1. To make the caramels, melt 1 cup of granulated sugar in an agate-ware saucepan, stirring until it turns brown.

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. Pecans + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Nuts + pecanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together121 recipes

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

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Milk + pecanstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy body to the ice cream.
Milk
Adds dairy liquid that, heated with cornstarch, forms a thickened custard base.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture so the finished ice cream is smoother and less icy.
Caramel
Adds deep, toasted sweetness and caramel flavor to the base.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and toasted, nutty flavor against the smooth ice cream.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar to brown caramel. Sugar burns quickly once it starts to darken. Stirring until it turns brown gives an even caramel flavor, while overheating produces a bitter taste.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, milk, pecans, walnut. 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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