Name: Ginger Ice Cream
Ingredients: 1 pint of custard; 3 ounces of preserved ginger; 1 teaspoon of ginger syrup

Why it works: Ginger and syrup work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 950 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Ginger Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 pint of custard
3 ounces of preserved ginger
1 teaspoon of ginger syrup

Directions

Make the custard according to your chosen recipe.
Cut the preserved ginger into small dice.
Stir the ginger and ginger syrup into the custard.
Freeze the mixture in the usual way.

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.

Ginger + syruptop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together950 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Custard: Provides the creamy base, with fat and egg proteins giving the ice cream its smooth, rich texture.
Preserved ginger: Adds the main flavour and bits of chewy texture throughout the ice cream.
Ginger syrup: Adds sweetness and extra ginger aroma, and its sugar helps keep the frozen texture soft.

“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.