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Dessert

Walnut Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from cream, sugar, eggs, and ground walnuts.

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

Walnut Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Whip the eggs and sugar together in a bowl.

  2. Add the cream and warm the mixture until it begins to thicken, but do not let it boil.

Finish and freeze

  1. Stir in the pounded walnuts and mix well.

  2. Freeze the mixture in molds.

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

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

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  4. Cream + walnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Egg + meattop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard base as they set gently with warming, giving body to the ice cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and helps keep the frozen texture softer and smoother.
Cream
Provides fat and richness, making the ice cream creamy and smooth on the palate.
English walnut meats
Add nutty flavour and a textured crunch throughout the frozen custard.

The step that matters

Warming the cream without boiling. Heat gently until the mixture just begins to thicken. Boiling can curdle the egg proteins, leaving a grainy, lumpy custard instead of a smooth base.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Filbertfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, meat. 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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