Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Cream Ice

A chilled dessert made from red currant juice and cream, sweetened and optionally garnished with berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Currant Cream Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the red currant juice with the cream.

  2. Sweeten to taste.

Freeze and finish

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid.

  2. For an improvement, add a few raspberries or strawberries.

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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant juice
Provides the main fruit flavour and a bright, tart acidity.
Cream
Adds fat for a rich, smooth texture and a creamy mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the ice crystals so the frozen mixture is less hard.

The step that matters

Sweeten to taste before freezing. Cold dulls our perception of sweetness, so a mixture that tastes right at room temperature can taste flat once frozen. Adjusting sweetness before freezing gives a more accurate result.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

More currant ice cream recipes

You might also like