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Dessert

Lemon Cream Ice

A chilled lemon-flavored custard dessert made with milk or cream, sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon, salt, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lemon Cream Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine the milk or cream, sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon, and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture gently, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Remove the saucepan from heat.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Whisk in the egg yolks until well combined.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Milk or cream
Provides the liquid base and fat that give the ice cream a smooth, rich body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Egg yolks
Thicken the base and add richness, helping it set into a smooth custard.
Lemon rind
Adds bright citrus aroma and flavor from the oils in the peel.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before whisking in the egg yolks. Egg yolks scramble when added to a very hot liquid. Cooling the base first lets the yolks blend smoothly and thicken evenly instead of turning grainy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, cinnamon, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, cinnamon, egg. 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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