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Dessert

Common Ice Cream

A custard-based ice cream made with sugar, eggs, corn starch, cream, milk, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Common Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Add the corn starch to the milk and stir until dissolved.

  3. Let the mixture cool slightly.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together until well combined.

  5. Add the egg and sugar mixture to the cooled milk mixture.

  6. Stir in the cream and vanilla flavor.

Freeze

  1. Strain the mixture into an ice cream freezer.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  5. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Add richness and help give the custard a smooth, creamy body.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture so the base holds body and resists icy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the ice cream rich and smooth-textured.
Fresh milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens and the other ingredients blend into.

The step that matters

Add the egg and sugar mixture to the cooled milk mixture. If the milk is still hot, the eggs can scramble when added. Letting the milk cool slightly first helps keep the custard smooth and fully blended.

“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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