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Dessert

Ice Pudding a LA Moderne

A chilled custard dessert flavored with brandy, orange zest, apricots, pistachios, and maraschino, served with apricot syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Ice Pudding a LA Moderne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Combine the cream, eggs, and sugar in a saucepan to make custard.

  2. Heat the mixture until thickened, then remove from heat.

  3. Stir in ½ cup of cream and let cool.

  4. Add brandy and orange zest, then freeze in a mold.

Poach the apricots

  1. Peel and halve the apricots, arranging them in a basin.

  2. Boil 1½ pounds of sugar with ¾ pint of water in a pot.

  3. Pour the syrup over the apricots and cover to retain steam.

  4. After an hour, check apricots for tenderness.

  5. If not tender, reboil syrup and pour over them again.

  6. Once nearly cold, place apricots on ice to chill.

Prepare the pistachios and serve

  1. Boil pistachio nuts for a few minutes.

  2. Strain and rub to remove skins.

  3. Split and shred the nuts.

  4. Pour half the syrup from the apricots.

  5. Add ½ cup of maraschino to the remaining syrup.

  6. Sprinkle with pistachio nuts.

  7. Serve the ice pudding in the center of a dish, surrounded by apricots and drizzled with the syrup.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Orange + apricottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together703 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Brandy + apricottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Apricot + pistachiotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. 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

Eggs
Thicken the custard base when heated and give it structure once frozen.
Single cream
Provides the fat and body that make the frozen custard rich and smooth.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and syrup and keeps the frozen texture softer.
Apricots
Provide fruit flavour and are softened by the hot syrup poaching.

The step that matters

Heating the custard until thickened. Eggs can scramble if overheated, leaving lumps. Heat gently and stir so the custard thickens smoothly before it is removed from the heat and cooled.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, sugar, brandy, orange, apricot, pistachio):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, sugar, brandy, orange, apricot, pistachio. 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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