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Dessert

Cherry Ice

A frozen dessert made from canned cherries, sugar, lemon juice, and optional red wine.

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

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine cherries, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl.

Freeze

  1. If desired, add red wine before freezing.

  2. Freeze the mixture, using more rock salt with the ice for better results.

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

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

  2. Lemon + red winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together779 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + red winetop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together864 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor and much of the body of the ice cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping it softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cherry flavor.

The step that matters

Freezing with extra rock salt in the ice. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, so the surrounding ice gets colder than plain ice would. A colder bath freezes the mixture faster, which keeps ice crystals small and the texture smoother. Using too little salt slows freezing and can leave the ice cream icy and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, red wine. 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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