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Dessert

White House Tutti Frutti

A frozen dessert made from egg whites, sugar, milk, and candied fruits, nuts, and cherry juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and chestnut 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 ↓

White House Tutti Frutti

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Beat the egg whites, sugar, and milk together.

  2. Scald the mixture in a double boiler until it thickens.

  3. Strain the mixture and flavor it with vanilla.

Freeze and add fruit

  1. Freeze the mixture.

  2. Soak the fruits and nuts in cherry juice for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Add the soaked fruits and nuts to the cream after it is frozen.

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. Pistachio + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Pistachio + cherrytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together102 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Cherry + pineappletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

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

  5. Chestnut + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Provide protein that thickens the custard base when gently heated and gives it structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen cream.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that becomes the frozen cream.
Cherry juice
Flavors the candied fruits and nuts and keeps them moist during soaking.

The step that matters

Scalding the mixture in the double boiler. Egg proteins thicken the custard as it heats, but if the heat is too high they set in lumps and curdle. A double boiler applies gentle, even heat so the mixture thickens smoothly.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, pistachio, milk, chestnut, cherry, pineapple):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, pistachio, milk, chestnut, cherry, pineapple. 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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