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Custard Ice Cream

A chilled custard mixture made with milk, arrowroot, egg, and fruit or lemon juice, then frozen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Custard Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the arrowroot in the milk until thickened.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in the well-beaten egg.

Flavour and freeze

  1. Add lemon juice or fruit juice to taste.

  2. Chill the mixture until cold, then freeze it.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Milk
Forms the base of the custard and supplies the creamy body of the ice cream.
Arrowroot
Thickens the milk as it boils, giving the mixture body without a flour taste.
Egg
Enriches the custard and helps it set smoothly and firm when frozen.

The step that matters

Boil the arrowroot in the milk until thickened. Arrowroot must reach a full boil to thicken properly. Under-cooked starch leaves the base thin and grainy, and the mixture will not freeze to a smooth texture.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, lemon. 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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