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Dessert

Iced Cups

A dessert of cups filled with ice cream and a flavored syrup lining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Iced Cups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a bowl, mix the sugar and water to create a syrup.

  2. Flavor the syrup with your choice of fruit and add food coloring.

Form the cups

  1. Place tin cups in a tub of freezing mixture, no deeper than the cups.

  2. Fill the cups with the syrup and let stand for about 35 minutes to form a lining.

  3. Pour out the unfrozen syrup and return the cups to freeze dry.

Fill and serve

  1. Prepare almond bisque or vanilla ice cream.

  2. Fill the frozen cups with the ice cream.

  3. Cover the tub tightly and keep it well supplied with pounded ice and salt.

  4. To serve, wipe the outside of the cups with a cloth dipped in lukewarm water, turn out onto a cold plate, and serve quickly.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Orange + strawberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together726 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Strawberry + almondtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to make a syrup that freezes softer and sweetens the lining.
Water
Forms the base of the syrup that freezes into the lining of the cups.
Almond bisque or vanilla ice cream
Provides the creamy filling that fills the frozen cups.

The step that matters

Forming the syrup lining. Pour out the syrup only after it has frozen to a lining of the right thickness. Too little time leaves the cup thin and watery, while too much time leaves it solid. Sugar lowers the freezing point, so the syrup stays partly liquid and forms a softer shell than plain water would.

Swap the strawberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Strawberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, lemon, almond. 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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