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Dessert

Nut Ice Creams

A frozen dessert made by mixing chopped nuts into sweet cream and coloring walnuts green.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mixed nuts and pistachio share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Nut Ice Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Chop and mix

  1. Chop the nuts finely.

  2. Mix the chopped nuts into the sweet cream.

Color and freeze

  1. Dissolve a little green food coloring in alcohol.

  2. Stir the green coloring into the English walnuts until colored.

  3. Freeze the mixture as you would with other ice cream recipes.

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. Mixed nuts + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together195 recipes

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

  3. Pistachio + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Mixed nuts + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Walnut + spinachtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together221 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet cream
Provides the fat and body that make the ice cream rich and creamy.
Mixed nuts
Adds crunch and nutty flavor throughout the frozen cream.
Pistachios
Add crunch and a distinct nutty flavor to the ice cream.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a nutty flavor, and take on the green color.

The step that matters

Dissolve the green coloring in alcohol first. Coloring dissolved in alcohol spreads evenly through the nuts and cream instead of clumping, so the green looks uniform rather than streaked or spotted.

Swap the filbert

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mixed nuts, walnut, pistachio, cream, spinach):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mixed nuts, walnut, pistachio, cream, spinach. 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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