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Pistache Ice Cream

A pistachio ice cream flavored with rosewater and spinach green for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pistache Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Shell the pistachio nuts.

  2. Pour boiling water over the nuts and rub off the skins with a wet towel.

Make the paste and mix

  1. Pound the nuts to a smooth paste in a mortar, adding rosewater to prevent oiling.

  2. Color the paste with spinach green.

  3. Mix the pistachio paste into the ice cream.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Cream + spinachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 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

Blanched pistachio nuts
Supply the main nut flavor and form the body of the green paste.
Good ice cream
Forms the creamy base that the pistachio paste is mixed into.
Rosewater
Adds a floral aroma and helps keep the paste from separating into oil.
Spinach green
Gives the ice cream its green color.

The step that matters

Pounding the nuts with rosewater. Grinding nuts releases their oils, which can separate and leave the paste greasy and grainy. Adding a little liquid helps the paste stay smooth and evenly blended before it goes into the ice cream.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, cream, spinach. 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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