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Dessert

Tutti Frutti Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and preserved fruits, optionally colored with carmine and ammonia.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tutti Frutti Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Mix cream, powdered sugar, and eggs in a large bowl until well combined.

  2. Heat the mixture in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it just reaches boiling point.

  3. Remove from heat and continue stirring until nearly cool.

  4. Stir in the vanilla extract.

Freeze and add fruit

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezer and freeze until half frozen.

  2. Chop the preserved fruits into small pieces and mix them into the half-frozen cream.

Color and finish

  1. If desired, dissolve carmine in water and add spirits of ammonia to create a streaky color.

  2. Mix the color into the ice cream for a marbled effect before fully freezing.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Vanilla + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together558 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Vanilla + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together608 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Vanilla + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together911 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Apricot + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard base and add richness as they cook gently with the cream.
Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the frozen ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Preserved fruits
Add chunks of concentrated fruit flavor and chew throughout the frozen cream.

The step that matters

Heating the custard to just boiling. Egg-thickened custard can curdle or turn grainy if overheated, so heat over medium with constant stirring and stop once it just reaches boiling point.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, egg, vanilla, peach, apricot, spirit):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, vanilla, peach, apricot, spirit. 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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