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Dessert

Ice Cream Filling

A sweet filling made from sugar syrup and beaten egg whites, flavored with lemon or vanilla, used between cake layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Ice Cream Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and boil until it forms a thick, clear syrup or begins to become brittle.

  2. While the syrup is boiling hot, pour it slowly over the beaten egg whites, stirring briskly.

  3. Continue beating the mixture until it cools down.

  4. Flavor the mixture with lemon or vanilla extract.

Assemble the cake

  1. Spread the filling between layers of white cake for an ice-cream cake.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that the hot syrup sets, giving the filling its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the filling and sets firm as it cools.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the beaten whites. The hot syrup partly cooks the egg white proteins and stabilises the foam, as in Italian meringue. Pouring slowly while beating briskly spreads the heat evenly, so the whites do not cook into lumps or collapse.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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