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Pistachio Cream Ice

A pistachio ice cream flavored with rose water and colored with spinach.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 110 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Cream Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pistachio base

  1. Blanch the pistachio nuts and pound them into a smooth paste with sugar and rose water.

  2. Gradually add the milk to the pistachio paste and mix well.

Make the custard

  1. Place the mixture in a bain-marie and add the strained egg yolks to make a custard.

  2. Once the custard forms, strain it through a fine sieve and whisk in spinach greening for color.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture, adding whipped cream when it is half frozen.

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. Pistachio + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

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

  3. Nuts + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Nuts + spinachtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavour and the pale green colour of the ice cream.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point so the ice cream stays scoopable.
Whole milk
Supplies the liquid base that the custard and ice cream are built on.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness through emulsifying fats and proteins.
Whipped cream
Adds fat and air, giving a lighter, creamier texture after freezing.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard in the bain-marie. Egg yolks thicken from gentle heat, and if the mixture gets too hot the proteins scramble and the custard turns grainy. Stop as soon as it coats a spoon, then strain it.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pistachio, nuts, sugar, rose, milk, egg, coffee):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, nuts, sugar, rose, milk, egg, coffee. 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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