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Dessert

Tea Ice Cream

A cold dessert made by boiling milk with tea, sugar, eggs, orange rind, and cream, then freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Tea Ice Cream

Why it works: Orange and tea work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 333 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tea Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Bring 1 gallon of fresh milk to a boil.

  2. Add ½ pound of orange Pekoe tea and steep for about 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in 2½ pounds of sugar, 4 whole eggs, and the grated rind of 2 oranges until the sugar is dissolved.

  4. Add 1 gallon of cream and mix well.

Freeze

  1. Freeze.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Orange + teatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Orange pekoe tea
Provides the main tea flavour, infused into the hot milk during steeping.
Eggs
Add richness and help the custard base set smoothly when frozen.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point for a softer texture.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the ice cream rich and creamy.
Fresh milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the tea and other flavours.

The step that matters

Stir in the sugar and eggs until the sugar dissolves. Undissolved sugar leaves grainy spots in the frozen ice cream. Eggs mixed into hot liquid can scramble if the base is too hot, so stir steadily and keep the mixture smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, tea, sugar, 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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