Skip to main content

Pistachio and Almond Creams

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistachio and Almond Creams

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare vanilla ice cream according to your preferred recipe.

  2. Pour boiling water over the pistachio nuts and let them sit for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the skins from the pistachio nuts and pound them into a paste using a mortar.

  4. Mix the pistachio paste with the prepared vanilla ice cream.

  5. Freeze until firm.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Vanilla + pistachiotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together407 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Cream + pistachiotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Vanilla and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,301 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

Swap the vanilla

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, pistachio, nuts):

  1. Vanillathe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pistachio, nuts. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesPistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes