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Dessert

Grape Fruit Ice

A chilled dessert made from grapefruit juice, lemon juice, orange juice, ginger extract, sherry wine, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the water and sugar together for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and let it cool.

Make and freeze the ice

  1. Once cool, add the grapefruit juice, lemon juice, ginger extract, orange juice, and sherry wine.

  2. Strain the mixture and freeze slowly.

Serve

  1. Serve heaped in the grapefruit skins, which should be kept intact after removing the pulp and juice.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer and easier to scoop.
Grapefruit juice
Supplies the main citrus flavour and tartness of the ice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Orange juice
Adds body, sweetness and mellow citrus flavour.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and depth, and its alcohol further softens the frozen texture.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture slowly. Slow freezing lets ice crystals grow larger, so the texture becomes coarse rather than fine. Sugar and alcohol lower the freezing point, so the mixture stays partly soft and must be frozen carefully to set evenly.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, sherry, wine, orange, grapefruit):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, sherry, wine, orange, grapefruit. 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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