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Dessert

Pistachio Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with pistachio nuts, spinach juice, cream, and sugar.

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

Why it works: Pistachio and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pistachios and spinach

  1. Blanch and grate the pistachio nuts.

  2. Boil the spinach in a kettle, then drain and pound it until it becomes a pulp.

  3. Squeeze the juice from the spinach pulp through a flannel cloth.

Make the base

  1. In a pot, boil 1½ gallons of cream with the sugar until the sugar dissolves, then let it cool.

  2. Once cooled, add the pistachio nuts, flavoring, and the remaining cream.

  3. Mix in the spinach juice to color the ice cream.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream freezer and freeze.

  2. When hard, remove the dasher and beat the cream, then set aside to harden.

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. Pistachio + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

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

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

  4. Nuts + spinachtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachio nuts
Supplies the main nutty flavor and aroma, and fine grated bits add body.
Cream
Provides fat for a rich, smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point so the ice cream stays softer.
Spinach
Its juice gives the ice cream a green color; it adds color rather than flavor.

The step that matters

Dissolve the sugar fully in the boiling cream. Undissolved sugar stays as grains that can make the frozen ice cream feel gritty, so the sugar must be completely dissolved before the mixture cools.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, nuts, cream, sugar. 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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