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Walnut Cream Ice

A custard-based ice made from walnuts, milk, cream, sugar, brandy, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Cream Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnut paste

  1. Shell and skin the walnuts.

  2. Pound the walnuts in a mortar with the milk to form a paste.

  3. Mix the walnut paste with the cream, sugar, brandy, and egg yolks.

Make the custard

  1. Cook the mixture over low heat to form a custard.

  2. Pass the custard through a sieve.

Freeze and mold

  1. Freeze the mixture and mold it.

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. Milk + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Walnut + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Brandy + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main flavor and a rich, slightly oily body to the ice.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as it cooks and give the ice a smooth, creamy texture.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, keeping the frozen texture smooth and soft.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice from freezing too hard.
Milk
Helps grind the walnuts into a smooth paste and adds moisture.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture over low heat to form a custard. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but too much heat can scramble them into lumps. Low, steady heat and stirring keep the custard smooth before it is strained and frozen.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Cocoafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, sugar, brandy, 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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