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Pistachio Ice Cream

A pistachio ice cream flavored with spinach juice, cream, sugar, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Pistachio Ice Cream

Why it works: Spinach and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach.

  2. Boil the spinach in a kettle of boiling water, then drain it.

  3. Pound the spinach until it becomes a pulp.

  4. Squeeze the juice through a fine cloth.

Prepare the pistachios

  1. Blanch the pistachio nuts.

  2. Pound the pistachio nuts.

Make and freeze the ice cream

  1. Boil 1 gallon of cream with the sugar in a pot, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add the pistachio nuts, flavoring, and an additional ½ gallon of rich cream.

  4. Mix in the spinach juice to color the mixture.

  5. Pour the mixture into an ice cream freezer and freeze.

  6. When hard, remove the dasher.

  7. Beat the cream.

  8. Set aside to harden.

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. Spinach + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  4. Spinach + nutstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Its juice provides the green color of the finished ice cream.
Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavor and texture through the base.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy body.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.

The step that matters

Squeeze the juice through a fine cloth. Spinach pulp left in the mixture would add grit and dilute the colour. Squeezing through a fine cloth separates the liquid for a smooth, evenly green base.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, nuts, cream, sugar. 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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