Name: Nut Ice Cream
Ingredients: 1 quart vanilla ice cream; 1 cup mixed ground nuts (pecans, filberts, almonds, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pistachios, hickory nuts)

Why it works: Almond and brazil nut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Nut Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 quart vanilla ice cream
1 cup mixed ground nuts (pecans, filberts, almonds, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pistachios, hickory nuts)

Directions

Prepare

Prepare vanilla ice cream according to your preferred method.

Add the nuts

Once the ice cream is frozen, either stir in the ground nuts or serve the ice cream and add the nuts on top.
For family servings, mix the nuts into the ice cream before serving.
Keep jars of ground nuts ready to add to individual servings as desired.

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.

Almond + brazil nuttop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together68 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Walnut + brazil nuttop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together66 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together993 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pecans + brazil nuttop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together40 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Vanilla + almondtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,961 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Vanilla ice cream: Forms the base of the dessert and supplies the sweet, creamy body.
Mixed ground nuts: Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor against the smooth, cold ice cream.

Swap the filbert

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vanilla, cream, nuts, pecans, almond, walnut, brazil nut):

Pistachiofits better
Cashew nutfits better
Hazelnutfits better
Filbertthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vanilla, cream, nuts, pecans, almond, walnut, brazil nut. 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.