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New York Ice Cream

A vanilla ice cream base mixed with beaten egg yolks and optional yellow coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Vanilla and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,301 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

New York Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl.

  2. Stir the beaten yolks into the vanilla ice cream.

  3. Add yellow food coloring if desired, then mix until well combined.

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. Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Vanilla and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,301 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and a custard-like body, along with a pale yellow tint.
Vanilla ice cream
Provides the sweet, creamy base that the beaten yolks are stirred into.

The step that matters

Mixing in the yolks. Beaten yolks need to be fully blended into the ice cream. Thorough mixing spreads the yolk evenly, so the texture stays smooth and streak-free instead of having pockets of yolk.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Vanillathe original
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Strawberryfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream. 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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