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Dessert

Ice Cream Without Cooking

A chilled dessert made by mixing milk, eggs, sugar, corn starch, and sweet cream, then freezing with ice and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Ice Cream Without Cooking

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a three-quart tin pail, mix the milk, beaten eggs, sugar, and corn-starch.

  2. Boil the mixture in a kettle of water until it thickens.

Freeze

  1. Add the sweet cream and flavor to taste.

  2. Freeze the mixture in a suitable vessel with equal parts of chopped ice and coarse sea salt.

  3. Rotate the pail and stir frequently while freezing.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients are dissolved and set into.
Eggs
Proteins set when heated, adding structure and body to the thickened mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Corn-starch
Swells when heated with liquid, thickening the mixture into a smooth custard.
Sweet cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen result richer and smoother in texture.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens. The eggs and corn-starch thicken the custard as it heats. Overheating can curdle the eggs and leave a grainy texture, so heat should be watched closely as it thickens.

“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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