Name: Macaroon Ice Cream
Ingredients: 1 cup macaroons, dried and crushed; 1 quart vanilla ice cream

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 ↓

Macaroon Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 cup macaroons, dried and crushed
1 quart vanilla ice cream

Directions

Add the crushed macaroons to the vanilla ice cream and mix well until combined.
Freeze until firm.

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.

Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,301 recipes

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

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

Macaroons: Add crunch and a toasty, almond-like sweetness that contrasts with the smooth ice cream.
Vanilla ice cream: Provides the cold, creamy base that the crushed macaroons are folded into.

“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.