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To Prepare Ice for Icing

A method for preparing ice and salt to chill cream for icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Prepare Ice for Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ice bath

  1. Break the ice into small pieces and mix in the salt in a bucket.

  2. Ensure there are holes in the bucket to drain water as the ice melts.

Make the cream

  1. Place your cream in an ice pot and cover it.

  2. Surround the pot with the ice and salt mixture.

  3. Stir the cream with a spoon after a few minutes, moving the ice from the edges to the center.

Flavor the mixture

  1. Rub sugar on lemon or orange peel for flavor, then squeeze the juice into a bowl.

  2. Add sugar and water to the juice, strain, and pour into the ice pot.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Cream
Provides fat and richness, which gives the frozen dessert a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping it softer when frozen.
Lemon or orange peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils that scent the mixture as the sugar draws them out.

The step that matters

Stir the cream while it chills. Stirring moves the cream away from the cold walls of the pot so it freezes evenly. Without it, ice crystals form on the edges and the texture becomes coarse and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar. 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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