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Dessert

Mille-fruit Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with lemon zest, lemon juice, cream, sugar, and preserved fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Mille-fruit Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Grate a lemon on a lump of sugar and scrape it into a bowl.

  2. Add the juice of four lemons and 1½ pints of cream.

  3. Sweeten with clarified sugar to taste and freeze as directed.

Add the fruit

  1. Just before it is fully frozen, add dried cherries, preserved gherkins, and any other preserved green fruit.

  2. Incorporate candied orange and lemon peel cut into pieces the size of a large pea.

  3. Add a pinch of cochineal for color.

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. Lemon + angelicatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together189 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Angelica + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together159 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the frozen ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright lemon aroma that balance the sweetness of the base.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer when frozen.
Candied orange and lemon peel
Adds concentrated citrus sweetness and chewy texture through the frozen cream.

The step that matters

Add the fruit just before it is fully frozen. If the mixture is fully frozen, the added pieces cannot be distributed evenly and the base becomes hard and icy. Adding them while it is still partly soft lets them mix through evenly.

Swap the angelica

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Peppermintfits about as well
  4. Angelicathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, cream, orange. 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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