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Dessert

Pear Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from pears, cream, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Pear Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pear cream

  1. Peel and core the pears, then cut them into quarters.

  2. Pass the pears through a fine sieve with the cream.

  3. Sweeten the mixture with sugar and add a little lemon juice.

Freeze and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezing pot and stir from the sides to the middle as it freezes.

  2. Once frozen, transfer the cream to an ice mold, cover, and pack it in ice.

  3. To serve, dip the mold in tepid water, wipe it, and turn the cream out onto a dish.

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. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

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

  3. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Pear + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Pears
Provide the main fruit flavour and body of the cream.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the frozen dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and softens the texture of the frozen cream.

The step that matters

Stirring while it freezes. Stirring from the sides to the middle keeps ice crystals small and the texture smooth. Letting the mixture freeze without stirring creates a coarse, icy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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