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Dessert

Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from cream, fruit or extracts, sugar, ice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Ice Cream

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 ↓

Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a bowl, combine pure cream, ripe fruits or extracts, and sugar.

Set up the freezer

  1. Pound ice and mix it with coarse sea salt in a 3:1 ratio.

  2. Place the freezing can in the center of a tub and secure the lid.

  3. Surround the can with the ice and salt mixture up to the cream level.

Churn and freeze

  1. Stir the cream rapidly and constantly to ensure smoothness.

  2. The ice-cream is ready when it stands heaped on a spoon.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pure cream
Provides fat, which makes the frozen ice cream rich and smooth.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Ripe natural fruits or good extracts
Supply the main flavour of the ice cream.
Coarse sea salt
Mixed with ice to lower its temperature well below freezing, so the cream can freeze.

The step that matters

Stirring the cream rapidly and constantly. Constant stirring keeps ice crystals small and the texture smooth. If the cream is left to freeze in place, it becomes coarse and icy.

“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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