Why it works: Avocado and banana share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and 40 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Contains: egg, milk, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)
Also mentioned in the method: milk, custard
Directions
Make the custard
Separate yolks from 5 eggs, add 2¢ sugar, 1 qt milk, 4 medium avocados, green maraschino cherries, almonds, and vanilla extracts.
Make a boiled custard with the milk, eggs, and 1¢ sugar, and flavor with vanilla.
Prepare the fruit
Mash the fruit to a pulp with 1¢ sugar and flavor with almond extract.
Freeze and serve
When the custard is cool, add the fruit and freeze.
Serve in mounds with a green maraschino cherry on top of each mound.
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. See the original page.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Avocado + bananatop 13% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together40 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
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Avocado + almondtop 4% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together98 recipes
Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
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Almond + bananatop 9% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together377 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).
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Sugar + almondtop 10% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together15,678 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
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Egg + sugartop 10% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together122,252 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggs
- Yolks thicken the custard base and give it a rich, smooth body.
- Avocados
- Their fat and pulp give the ice cream a creamy, smooth texture.
- Milk (in the method)
- Forms the liquid base of the custard that the frozen dessert is built on.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the mixture and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
The step that matters
Cooking the boiled custard. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overheating can make them scramble and curdle. Cook gently and stir constantly until the custard coats a spoon, then cool it fully before adding the fruit.
Flavor stand-ins for the banana
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, avocado, almond):
- Vanillabetter flavor fit
- Coconutbetter flavor fit
- Cherrybetter flavor fit
- Bananathe original
Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, avocado, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).
“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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