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Dessert

Orange, Lemon and Banana Ice

A chilled fruit ice made with bananas, orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, water, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orange, Lemon and Banana Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 2 cups of water and sugar in a saucepan. Boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Cool the syrup and mix in the strained orange juice.

  3. Sieve the bananas and add them to the mixture along with the lemon juice.

Add the gelatine

  1. Divide the remaining cup of water in half. Dissolve the gelatin in one half and heat the other half until hot.

  2. Soak the gelatin in cold water for 5 minutes, then combine it with the hot water and pour into the fruit mixture.

Freeze or colour

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezer to freeze, or strain it through a coarse cheesecloth and add yellow cake coloring for a bright color.

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. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon 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

Bananas
Provide body, creamy texture and natural sweetness to the ice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Gelatine
Helps the ice set with a firmer, more cohesive texture.
Orange juice
Adds fruity flavor and a mild acidity to the mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Soak and fully dissolve the gelatine. Gelatine only sets when it is properly hydrated and fully dissolved in warm liquid. Undissolved granules leave chewy specks and an uneven texture in the frozen ice.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange. 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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