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Champagne Ice

A frozen beverage made from lemon juice, sugar, water, and Champagne.

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

  1. Juice and finely pulp the lemons.

Make the ice

  1. Combine the lemon juice, sugar, and enough water to make ½ gallon.

  2. Freeze the mixture until it resembles snow.

  3. Add the Champagne and freeze hard.

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. Sugar + champagnetop 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 fresh citrus flavour that balances the sugar.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Champagne
Adds its own aroma and flavour to the finished ice.

The step that matters

Freeze until it resembles snow. Freezing in stages and stirring or breaking up the ice as it forms gives a fine, grainy texture. Adding the Champagne only after this stage keeps its bubbles and aroma from being lost to a solid, flat freeze.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne. 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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