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Dessert

Currant Ice

A frozen dessert made from currant juice, sugar, water, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Currant Ice

Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Currant Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix currant juice, sugar, and water in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Freeze the mixture until it is partly frozen.

Add egg whites and finish freezing

  1. Add the beaten egg whites and mix well.

  2. Continue to freeze until fully set.

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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currant juice
Provides the main fruit flavor and a tart edge to the ice cream.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen texture softer by lowering the freezing point.
Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture to add lightness and an airy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg whites to the partly frozen mixture. If the base is too liquid or too firm, the whites will not blend evenly. Partly frozen mixture holds the whites in suspension, so they stay airy instead of deflating or separating.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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