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Dessert

Champagne Ice

A frozen dessert made with lemon juice, Champagne, sugar, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and champagne work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Champagne Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a large bowl.

  2. Grate the lemon rinds and add them to the bowl.

  3. Pour in the Champagne and add sugar or simple syrup to taste.

Finish and freeze

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve and 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. Lemon + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Champagne + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemons
Provide acidity and bright citrus aroma that balance the sweetness.
Champagne
Supplies the main liquid and its wine flavour to the mixture.
Sugar or simple syrup
Adds sweetness and softens the sharpness of the lemon.
Egg whites
Whipped air gives the frozen mixture a lighter, less dense texture.

The step that matters

Whipping and folding the egg whites. Whites must be whipped to stiff peaks and folded in gently so the trapped air is not lost. Deflated foam makes the ice denser and less light when frozen.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against champagne, sugar, egg. 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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