Name: Cocoa Nut Cream
Ingredients: 1 quart heavy cream; 1½ small cocoa nuts, grated; Sugar to taste

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cocoa Nut Cream

Ingredients

1 quart heavy cream
1½ small cocoa nuts, grated
Sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Remove the cocoa nut from its shell and pare it.
Grate the nut very fine.

Make and freeze

Mix the grated nut with the heavy cream and sweeten to taste.
Freeze the mixture until solid.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Cocoa + nutstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together65 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together886 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Cream + cocoatop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together304 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Nuts + sugartop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,228 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream: Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream its smooth, creamy texture.
Cocoa nuts: Supplies the main flavour and some fat, adding body to the frozen base.