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Dessert

Tangerine Ice

A chilled dessert made with tangerine peel, milk, egg yolks, sugar, and orange flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tangerine and orange work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tangerine Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Peel the tangerine oranges thinly.

  2. Add the peel to the milk and bring to a boil.

  3. Let it stand for 15 minutes without boiling.

  4. Strain the milk over the beaten egg yolks and sugar.

  5. Add the orange pulp.

  6. Pass through a fine sieve.

Finish and freeze

  1. Once cold, mix in the orange flower water.

  2. Freeze.

  3. Serve in cups, as a pile, or in a mold.

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. Tangerine + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the base and give the ice cream a rich, smooth body.
Milk or cream
Provides fat and liquid that give the ice cream its creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point for a softer scoop.
Tangerine oranges
Supply citrus juice, pulp and peel oils for bright tangerine flavor.

The step that matters

Strain the milk over the beaten egg yolks and sugar. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the hot milk is added too fast. Pouring slowly while whisking tempers the yolks, and the sieve catches any cooked bits for a smooth custard.

Swap the tangerine

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Tangerinethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, milk, egg, 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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