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Dessert

Gelatine Icing

A sweet icing made with gelatine, powdered sugar, water, flavoring, and pistachio nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Gelatine Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Heat on the stove and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add powdered sugar until the mixture is pourable.

  4. Beat the mixture until it becomes white and fluffy.

  5. Add flavoring to taste.

  6. Color the icing with the finely chopped pistachio nuts.

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

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

  2. Sugar + pistachiotop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the icing into a soft, stable structure as it cools.
Powdered sugar
Thickens the liquid and adds sweetness to the icing.
Pistachio nuts
Add flavor and a green colour to the icing.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine fully. Gelatine must be soaked, then heated until fully dissolved; undissolved granules leave gritty specks and uneven setting in the icing.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pistachio. 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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