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Dessert

Snowdrift Ice Cream

A homemade ice cream made with egg yolks, sugar, water, oil, cornstarch, salt, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snowdrift Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a bowl, mix the Wesson Cooking Oil with the egg yolks until thick.

  2. In a saucepan, dissolve the sugar in water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the cornstarch to the boiling mixture and cook until thickened.

Combine and freeze

  1. Cool the thickened mixture, then gradually add it to the egg yolk and oil mixture.

  2. Add flavoring to taste and freeze the mixture.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and add richness and a smooth, custard-like body.
Wesson cooking oil
Adds fat that makes the frozen texture creamy and rich.
Cornstarch
Thickens the boiling syrup so it holds body and resists ice crystals.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.

The step that matters

Cool the thickened mixture before adding it to the yolks. Adding the hot thickened mixture directly to raw egg yolks can scramble them. Cooling it first lets the yolks blend in smoothly and keeps the texture even.

“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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