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Dessert

Walnut Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with cream, sugar, egg, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Walnut Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak walnut meats in a little sherry wine for 1 hour before freezing (optional).

Make the base

  1. Beat the egg in a bowl.

  2. Add sugar and cream to the beaten egg and mix well.

  3. Freeze the mixture until firm.

Add the walnuts

  1. Once frozen, stir in the chopped walnuts.

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

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

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Cream + walnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat that makes the ice cream rich and smooth.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and keeps the frozen texture softer.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the base together.
Walnuts
Add crunch and nutty flavor to the finished ice cream.

The step that matters

Stir in the walnuts once frozen. Walnut pieces added to a liquid base would sink and settle unevenly. Stirring them in once the mixture is frozen keeps them spread through the ice cream.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Filbertfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, meat, sugar, egg. 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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