Name: Brown-bread Ice Cream
Ingredients: 3 slices of Boston brown bread; 1 quart of cream; ½ pound of sugar

Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Brown-bread Ice Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

3 slices of Boston brown bread
1 quart of cream
½ pound of sugar

Directions

Prepare the bread

Toast the brown bread in a cool oven until dry.
Roll and sift the toasted bread through a fine sieve.

Make the custard base

In a saucepan, heat 1 pint of cream over low heat, add the sugar, and stir until dissolved.
Remove from heat and add the remaining cream; let it cool.

Freeze and serve

Once cooled, freeze the mixture according to standard ice cream freezing directions.
When frozen, fold in the sifted brown bread, remove the dasher, and re-pack the ice cream.
Set aside for 2 hours before serving.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,789 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boston brown bread: Toasted and sifted into crumbs, it supplies the bread's distinctive flavour and a toasty, nutty character.
Cream: Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar: Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer and scoopable.

“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.