Skip to main content
Dessert

Pistachio Cream -Ice

A pistachio ice cream made with pistachios, sugar, egg yolks, milk or cream, orange flower water, and spinach-green coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the pistachios

  1. Scald, clean, and pound the pistachios to a pulp.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine the pistachio pulp, crushed sugar, egg yolks, salt, and milk or cream.

  2. Heat the mixture, stirring until it thickens.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve into a basin.

  4. Mix in the orange flower water and spinach-green, ensuring the coloring is well incorporated.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze until ready to serve.

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 + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Orange + spinachtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachios
Provide the main flavor and the pale green color of the ice cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness and a smooth, creamy texture.
Milk or cream
Supply the liquid base and fat that give the ice cream its body.
Crushed loaf sugar
Sweetens the base and helps keep the frozen texture soft.

The step that matters

Heating the custard until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if the mixture gets too hot it can curdle and turn grainy. Stirring constantly and stopping once it coats a spoon keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, sugar, egg, milk, spinach. 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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes