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Tutti Frutti Ice Cream

A custard ice cream with candied fruits and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Tutti Frutti Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, beat the sugar and egg yolks until creamy.

  2. In a double boiler, combine the cream, milk, and salt; add the egg mixture.

  3. Cook until it thickens into a custard, about 20 minutes, then strain and cool.

Freeze and add fruit

  1. Add vanilla extract and freeze the mixture.

  2. When the mixture is half‑frozen, add the diced candied fruits rolled in powdered sugar.

  3. Stir the fruits into the cream slowly, then repack and set aside to ripen.

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. Apricot + figtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pineapple + figtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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 with gentle heat, giving the ice cream a rich, smooth body.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen ice cream rich and creamy rather than icy.
Milk
Supplies liquid and milk solids that give the base body while keeping it lighter than cream alone.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer and scoopable.
Candied fruits
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness in pockets throughout the frozen base.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overheating can scramble them into lumps. Cooking gently and stirring keeps the custard smooth, and straining catches any bits that do set before the base is frozen.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, sugar, egg, pineapple, apricot, fig. 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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