Name: Ice Cream of Pine-nut Milk
Ingredients: 1 cup pine nuts; 2 cups cold or lukewarm water; 2 eggs; ¼ teaspoon salt; sugar to taste; 1 teaspoon vanilla

Why it works: Nuts and vanilla work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Ice Cream of Pine-nut Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pine nut milk

Grind or mash the pine nuts to a fine meal.
Add 2 cups of cold or lukewarm water to the pine nut meal and beat with a spoon.
Press the mixture through two thicknesses of cheesecloth.

Finish and freeze

To the resulting milk, add 2 well-beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, sugar to taste, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla, then mix well.
Freeze.

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.

Nuts + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together638 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together35,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Pine + vanillatop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together45 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).
Pine + nutstop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Pine nuts: Provide the base flavour and richness once ground and steeped into a milk.
Eggs: Add richness and help the mixture set to a creamy, custard-like texture when frozen.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture so it is less hard.