Name: Nut Ice Cream
Ingredients: 1 pound of English Walnut, Filbert, Almond, Pecan, Brazil, or Hickory nuts; cream; ice cream

Why it works: Walnut and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,982 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Nut Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 pound of English Walnut, Filbert, Almond, Pecan, Brazil, or Hickory nuts
cream
ice cream

Directions

Prepare the nuts

Grind about 1 pound of your chosen nuts.
Store the ground nuts in small tin boxes.

Assemble and serve

Fill a dish or measuring cup half full with cream.
Add a big teaspoonful of the ground nuts into the dish.
Fill the dish up with ice cream.
Turn the mixture out into a dish.
Sprinkle a few nuts over the top before serving.

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.

Walnut + creamtop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,982 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Nuts: Ground nuts add a toasty, nutty flavour and a slightly crunchy texture to the cream and ice cream.
Cream: Adds richness and moisture, giving the dessert a smooth, creamy body.
Ice cream: Forms the base of the dessert, setting the cold, smooth texture that the nuts and cream are folded into.

“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.