Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Ice Cream
Ingredients
Directions
Make the base
Wet the arrowroot with a little cold milk.
Add the arrowroot to the boiling milk.
Sweeten the mixture with white sugar and add the grated lemon peel.
Boil the mixture and strain it into the thick cream.
Freeze
When partly frozen, add the juice of the lemons.
If you lack a freezing apparatus, place the cream in a tightly covered tin pail.
Mix equal parts of snow and fine salt (or pounded ice and salt) in a tub and place the pail in it.
Turn the pail half round and back again with one hand for about 30-45 minutes, mixing the frozen part with the rest several times.
Ensure the mixture is perfectly cool before placing it in the freezer.
Cover the freezer tightly with snow and salt until ready to serve.
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.
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Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together553 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
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Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together19,053 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together29,399 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together817 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Arrowroot
- Thickens the milk mixture so the base becomes smooth and creamy when cooled.
- Thick cream
- Adds fat, which gives the frozen ice cream a rich, smooth texture.
- Milk
- Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens and the cream enriches.
- White sugar
- Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
- Lemon juice
- Adds acidity that gives the ice cream a bright, tart flavour.
The step that matters
Cool the mixture fully before freezing. Warm base freezes slowly and forms large ice crystals, giving a coarse, grainy texture. Chilling it first lets the churn freeze it quickly into smooth ice cream.
Swap the arrowroot
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, cream, sugar):
- Arrowrootthe original
- Potatofits about as well
- Sweet potatofits about as well
- Asparagusfits less well
Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, cream, 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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