Skip to main content
Dessert

Royal Ice Cream

A chilled dessert made from egg yolks, lemon zest, syrup, cream, spices, and fruit peel, finished with pistachios.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Royal Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Beat the egg yolks and whole eggs together in a bowl.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the lemon zest, syrup, cream, spice, and orange flower water.

  3. Heat the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and strain through a sieve.

Freeze and mould

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezing pot and freeze it.

  2. Once frozen, mix in the chopped citron, lemon, orange peel, and pistachio nuts.

  3. Transfer the mixture into molds and freeze 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + pistachiotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 recipes

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

  4. Orange + pistachiotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set and add richness and smoothness.
Whole eggs
Add further structure to the custard as it thickens on heating.
Cream
Provides fat that makes the frozen cream smooth and rich.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen mixture.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly until it thickens. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures and can curdle or scramble if overheated. Low heat with constant stirring thickens the custard evenly without lumps.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes