Skip to main content
Dessert

Ice Cream

A lemon-flavored ice cream made with milk, cream, arrowroot, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Ice Cream

Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Wet the arrowroot with a little cold milk.

  2. Add the arrowroot to the boiling milk.

  3. Sweeten the mixture very sweetly with white sugar.

  4. Stir in the grated lemon peel and boil the whole mixture.

  5. Strain it into the quart of cream.

Freeze

  1. When partly frozen, add the juice of the two lemons.

  2. If using a tin pail, mix equal quantities of snow and fine salt in a tub.

  3. Place the pail in the mixture.

  4. Turn it for half an hour, mixing the frozen part back in several times.

  5. Cover the pail tightly with snow and salt until ready to serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  5. Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk mixture so the finished ice cream is smooth and holds its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens and the sugar sweetens.
Thick cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen ice cream rich and creamy rather than icy.
White sugar
Sweetens the base and also lowers the freezing point, keeping the texture soft.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Add the lemon juice only when partly frozen. Acid added to a liquid mix can curdle or thin dairy, and adding it once the base has partly set helps keep the cream smooth and the texture even.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

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

More lemon ice cream recipes

Candy 4 See all 95 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes