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Dessert

Pistachio Water Ice

A frozen dessert made from ground pistachios, water, syrup, and optional flavoring and coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistachio Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the pistachio nuts well.

  2. Combine the ground pistachios with 1 pint of water and pass through a sieve.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add 30 ounces of syrup and flavor and color to your taste.

  2. Freeze the mixture.

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

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

  2. Pistachio + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Nuts + syruptop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together168 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

Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavor and the green color of the ice.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen ice.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pistachio, syrup):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, syrup. 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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