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Dessert

Currant Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from mashed currants, sugar, and thick sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Currant Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the currant juice

  1. Mash the currants and mix with sugar; let stand for 2 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture to obtain the juice.

Make and freeze the ice cream

  1. Add the juice to the cold cream; if not sweet enough, add more sugar.

  2. Pour into a freezer, let stand for 10 minutes, then 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  3. Currant + creamtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,829 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the tart, fruity flavour and the juice that colours and flavours the base.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and draws out liquid from the currants, adding sweetness to the finished ice cream.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the juice to the cream. Cold cream can be thrown off balance by the acidic juice, so taste before freezing and add sugar if needed. Sweetness is hard to correct once the mixture is frozen, because cold dulls perceived sweetness.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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