Skip to main content
Dessert

Red Currant Ice

A frozen dessert made from currants, raspberries, lemon juice, and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,270 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Red Currant Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip the currants from the stalks.

  2. Rub the currants and raspberries through a fine sieve.

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the fruit puree with enough cold syrup to make it sweet.

  2. Add the lemon juice if desired.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture using the ice and salt method described.

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. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the tart, sharp flavour and most of the fruit body of the ice cream.
Raspberries
Add aroma and a softer, sweeter fruit flavour alongside the currants.
Cold syrup
Adds sweetness and, as sugar, lowers the freezing point so the ice cream stays scoopable.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Sweeten the puree while it is cold. Sugar dissolved in cold puree lowers its freezing point and keeps the ice cream soft. Too little syrup makes the mixture freeze hard and taste sour, so taste and adjust before freezing.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes