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Dessert

Apricot Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with apricot jam, cream, lemon juice, and almond paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Apricot Ice Cream

Why it works: Apricot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Apricot Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Pound the almonds to a paste.

  2. Add the strained juice of the lemon and the cream; mix thoroughly.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Freeze and serve

  1. Prepare an outer container with layers of ice and coarse sea salt.

  2. Pour the mixture into the inner container, covering it well with the freezing mixture.

  3. Stir or shake until the ice begins to set.

  4. If serving in a mold, transfer to one and return to the machine; if serving in rough pieces on plates, it's ready when the ice begins to set.

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.

  1. Apricot + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  4. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Apricot + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat that makes the frozen ice cream rich and smooth.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the apricot.
Bitter almonds
Contribute a distinctive almond aroma from the pounded paste.
Apricot jam
Supplies sweetness and the main apricot flavour.

The step that matters

Stir or shake until the ice begins to set. Agitating the mixture as it freezes breaks up ice crystals, so the cream freezes smoothly rather than into a coarse, icy texture. Stopping too early or leaving it still lets large crystals form.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, cream, almond. 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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