Skip to main content
Dessert

Iced Pudding a LA Shakspeare

A frozen custard dessert flavored with caramel, curaçao, and dried fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Iced Pudding a LA Shakspeare

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Prepare a custard cream by mixing 1 pint of cream, 8 egg yolks, and 8 ounces of sugar.

  2. For the caramel, combine 4 ounces of sugar, 1 stick of cinnamon, the rind of 1 lemon, and ½ cup of water in a saucepan. Boil until very dark brown, then dilute with ½ cup of water and strain.

  3. Mix the custard, caramel essence, and ⅓ cup of curaçao.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture, then fold in the dried fruits and whipped cream.

  2. Mold the ice and embed it in rough ice and salt.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Cinnamon + pistachiotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together201 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + pistachiotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness to the frozen cream.
Cream
Provides fat and body, giving the frozen mixture a smooth, rich texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Dried fruits
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavor throughout the frozen dessert.
Whipped cream
Adds airiness and lightness to the frozen mixture.

The step that matters

Boil the caramel until very dark brown. Sugar darkens quickly near the end of cooking and can turn bitter or burnt. Stop at deep brown, then dilute with water carefully, since the hot syrup can spatter and seize.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, pistachio):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, pistachio. 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.

You might also like