Skip to main content
Dessert

Imitation Plum Cake Ice

A custard-based ice dessert flavored with chestnut farina, raisins, currants, candied peels, pistachios, and curaçao.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chestnut and pistachio share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Imitation Plum Cake Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make and mould

  1. Prepare a custard cream ice and add the chestnut farina.

  2. Mix in the stoned raisins, currants, candied peels, shredded pistachios, and curaçao.

  3. Mould the ice in a Charlotte mould.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, pour half-frozen vanilla cream ice over 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. Chestnut + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chestnut + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Chestnut + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pistachio + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together407 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + pistachiotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnut farina
Starch that thickens the cream and gives the ice a firmer, denser body.
Stoned raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to each bite.
Curaçao
Adds orange aroma and alcohol, which keeps the ice softer when frozen.
Vanilla cream ice
Forms the creamy base that carries the fruit, nuts and flavouring.

The step that matters

Pour the ice half-frozen. Partly frozen ice is soft enough to pour and spread over the mould but still holds its shape. Fully melted ice runs and loses structure, while fully hard ice will not spread evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chestnut, raisin, pistachio, vanilla, cream):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, raisin, pistachio, vanilla, 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.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesPistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipes