Skip to main content
Dessert

Ices

A homemade ice cream made by freezing cream with water, salt, ice, and fruit juice, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Ices

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cream

  1. Thoroughly cool the cream before placing it in the freezer.

  2. Stir the cream until chilled.

  3. Pack the cream away.

  4. Uncover the mixture and stir briskly for a few moments.

  5. Repack the mixture.

  6. Leave the mixture until ready to use.

Pack the freezer

  1. Use 1 part coarse sea salt to 2 parts crushed ice, packing it around the freezer to the height of the pail.

  2. Pour 1 pint of water over the ice and salt in the packing tub.

  3. If no ice cream freezer is available, use a deep tin pail with a cover.

  4. Pack the tin pail in a larger dish with ice and salt.

  5. Let it chill for about 30 minutes.

  6. Remove the cover and stir the mixture.

  7. Cover the dish and repack the dish.

  8. Insulate with a woolen cloth or carpet for about an hour in a cool place.

Add the fruit and freeze

  1. Mash the fruit and strain the juice.

  2. Sweeten.

  3. Add boiling water.

  4. Cool.

  5. Freeze.

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).

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, giving the frozen dessert a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen mixture softer by lowering its freezing point.
Coarse sea salt
Lowers the melting point of the ice in the packing tub, so the surroundings become colder than ice alone.
Fruit juice
Adds acidity and fruity flavor to the mixture.

The step that matters

Packing the ice and salt around the freezer. Salt dissolved into melting ice lowers its temperature below freezing, which is what chills the cream. Too little salt or ice leaves the mixture too warm to freeze properly.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes