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Dessert

Fruit Ice

Fruit Ice is a frozen dessert made from sugar, water, lemon juice, pineapple, oranges, cherry juice, grape juice, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Fruit Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil water and sugar together.

  2. Add lemon juice, pineapple, oranges, cherry juice, and grape juice.

  3. Add enough water to make 4½ gallons of ice.

Freeze and finish

  1. Freeze until mushy.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff.

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. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Pineapple + cherrytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Cherry + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together696 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped whites fold in air, giving the frozen fruit ice a lighter, fluffier texture.
Sugar
Dissolved in boiling water, it sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point for a softer texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff. Whites must be beaten to stiff peaks before folding, and folded gently so the trapped air is not lost. Partly frozen mush is then combined with them, so the whites should be added while the mixture is still soft enough to blend.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, pineapple, orange, cherry, egg. 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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