Name: Violet Ice Cream
Ingredients: 1 gallon cream; 1 ¾ pounds sugar; violet color; violet extract

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Violet Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 gallon cream
1 ¾ pounds sugar
violet color
violet extract

Directions

Strain the cream through a fine sieve.
Add a little violet color and violet extract.
Freeze the mixture until solid.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream: Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream its smooth, creamy body.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer when frozen.

“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.