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Dessert

Delmonico Ice Cream

A custard-based ice cream made with sweet cream, sugar, egg yolks, milk, gelatin, and optional banana or vanilla flavoring.

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

Delmonico Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a double boiler, heat the sweet cream until boiling.

  2. Add the granulated sugar, soaked gelatine, and beaten egg yolks gradually to prevent curdling.

  3. To temper the eggs, add a little hot cream to the bowl of eggs, then pour it back into the double boiler.

  4. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens slightly, resembling thin custard.

Flavor

  1. Remove from heat and flavor with sliced bananas or vanilla and almond extract if desired.

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

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

  2. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set gently with heat.
Sweet cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen custard.
Gelatine
Helps the custard set firmly and keeps the frozen texture smooth.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet hot liquid too quickly. Adding sugar first and tempering with a little hot cream, while stirring constantly, keeps them smooth and thickening evenly.

Swap the banana

The recipe marks banana as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, egg, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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