Skip to main content
Dessert

Ice Cream

A chilled dessert made from milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, arrowroot, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Ice Cream

Why it works: Arrowroot and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 242 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil 2 quarts of milk.

  2. Stir in 1 pint of cold milk mixed with 4 tablespoons of arrowroot until smooth.

  3. Scald the mixture but do not boil.

  4. When cold, add 2 quarts of cream, 1 tablespoon of vanilla, and 2 pints of sugar.

Freeze and finish

  1. Put the mixture in a freezer and churn until well chilled.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

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 + vanillatop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Vanilla and sugar 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk mixture so the base becomes smooth and creamy when scalded.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to add lightness and airy texture to the frozen mixture.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the ice cream a smooth, soft texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the freezing texture so the ice cream stays scoopable.

The step that matters

Scald without boiling. Heating the arrowroot mixture until just scalded lets the starch thicken the milk. Boiling can break down the thickener's hold and leave the base thin or grainy.

Swap the arrowroot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, vanilla, sugar, egg. 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 ice cream recipes

Strawberry 208Vanilla 203Chocolate 177Cake 127Coffee 119Pineapple 104 See all 440 →

You might also like

Arrowroot PuddingArrowroot Pudding46 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes