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Dessert

Pistachio Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with spinach, pistachio nuts, cream, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Pistachio Ice Cream

Why it works: Spinach and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach and nuts

  1. Wash the spinach and boil it in a kettle of boiling water, then drain.

  2. Pound the spinach until it becomes a pulp and squeeze the juice through a fine cloth.

  3. Blanch and pound the pistachio nuts.

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine 2½ cups of cream and 1 pound of sugar, and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Allow to cool.

  2. Once cooled, add the pistachio nuts, flavoring, and 2½ cups of rich cream.

  3. Mix in the spinach juice to color the mixture.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream freezer and freeze.

  2. When hard, remove the dasher from the freezer, beat the cream, and set aside to harden.

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. Spinach + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Spinach + nutstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 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

Spinach
Its juice supplies the green color of the finished ice cream.
Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavor and body of the ice cream.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream soft.

The step that matters

Cooling the sugar and cream base before adding the nuts. Adding the nuts and rich cream to a warm base can melt the cream and slow freezing. Cooling it fully first helps the mixture freeze smoothly and firm up evenly in the freezer.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, nuts, cream, sugar. 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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