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Ice Cream Without a Freezer

A custard-based ice cream made by freezing in an ice and salt bath without a freezer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Ice Cream Without a Freezer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Make a smooth custard by combining milk, cream, sugar, eggs, extract, and corn‑starch in a saucepan.

  2. Heat gently until thickened, then cool the mixture.

Freeze

  1. Pour the cooled custard into a tin pail with a tight cover.

  2. Place the tin pail in a larger pail or tub filled with ice and coarse sea salt.

  3. Heap ice around the tin pail and let it freeze for about an hour.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 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
Egg proteins thicken the custard as it heats and add richness.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen ice cream smooth and rich.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the custard and ice crystals form in.
White sugar
Sweetens the base and keeps the frozen texture softer.
Corn-starch
Thickens the custard so it holds body when cooled and frozen.

The step that matters

Heat gently until thickened. Eggs can curdle or scramble if overheated, so the custard should be heated slowly and stirred until it just thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, sugar, egg, corn. 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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