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Cherrt Ics

A chilled cherry ice cream made with cherries, sugar, lemon juice, and cherry kernels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,301 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cherrt Ics

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Stone the cherries and bruise them.

  2. Combine cherries, water, and ½ pound of sugar in a pot and boil.

  3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl.

Make the mixture

  1. Pound the cherry kernels and add them to a bowl with the lemon juice.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar to the cherry mixture and strain into the lemon juice and kernels.

  3. Mix everything together and place in a sorbetière with pounded ice.

Freeze and serve

  1. Stir until it sets.

  2. Serve in glasses.

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 + cherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Ripe cherries
Provide the main flavour and the fruit base that gives the ice cream its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers the freezing point so it stays soft rather than rock hard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cherry flavour and balances the sweetness.
Cherry kernels
Add a subtle almond-like aroma to the mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring until it sets. Stirring over pounded ice keeps the mixture moving so small ice crystals form instead of large ones, giving a smooth texture. Stopping too early leaves it watery, while over-chilling makes it hard and grainy.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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