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Ices in a Nest of Spun Sugar

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and peppermint match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,583 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Ices in a Nest of Spun Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make lemon ice by juicing the lemon and freezing the juice.

  2. Divide the lemon ice in half; color one half light green and flavor it with peppermint extract.

  3. Serve the two ices together in glass cups, layering one on top of the other.

  4. Cut a head of lettuce into strips to resemble grass and shape it into a nest on a plate.

  5. Place the yolks of hard-boiled eggs in the center of the lettuce nest and top with a spoonful of mayonnaise.

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. Lemon + pepperminttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Peppermint + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together269 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, peppermint, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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