Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with currant jelly, syrup, lemon juice, cream, and cochineal for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Syrup and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,964 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Currant Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine the currant jelly and syrup.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of 1½ lemons.

  3. Add the cream and a little cochineal.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid.

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. Syrup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

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

  3. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes
  5. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and cream 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

Currant jelly
Provides the fruit flavor and sweetness that give the ice cream its character.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen ice cream rich and smooth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and softens the freezing texture by limiting large ice crystals.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, lemon, cream. 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.

More currant ice cream recipes

Red 3 See all 29 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes