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Dessert

Biscuits Glaces

A frozen custard made with cream, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla, lemon, and orange juices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Biscuits Glaces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat ½ gallon of cream in a pot.

  2. Beat together 2 pounds of sugar and 18 egg yolks until very light.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling cream.

  4. Cook until thick.

  5. Remove from heat.

  6. Let cool.

  7. Add 1 tablespoon of vanilla and the juices of 1 lemon and 2 oranges.

Freeze and finish

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezer.

  2. Freeze.

  3. Whip the remaining ½ gallon of cream to stiff peaks.

  4. Fold the whipped cream into the frozen mixture.

  5. Fill fancy molds or paper cases with the mixture.

  6. Pack the mixture in ice and salt.

  7. Freeze for 2 hours.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Vanilla + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 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. Vanilla + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and vanilla 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

Cream
Provides the rich fat base, and the whipped portion adds airy volume to the frozen dessert.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer when frozen.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness and emulsifying fat to the base.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until thick. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently; overheating can scramble them into lumps. Stop once the custard coats a spoon, since it thickens further as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, vanilla, orange. 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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