Skip to main content
Dessert

Prune Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with cream, orange juice, prunes, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Prune Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Wash the prunes.

  2. Cover them with cold water.

  3. Soak overnight.

  4. Cook the prunes until very tender.

  5. Drain the prunes.

  6. Remove the stones.

  7. Press the fruit through a sieve.

  8. Let the pulp cool.

Make the custard base

  1. Add the sugar to half of the cream.

  2. Scald the mixture.

  3. Cool the mixture.

  4. Stir in the orange juice.

  5. Stir in the prune pulp.

  6. Stir in the remaining cream.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Cream + orangetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,170 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Prunes
Provide the main flavour and body, and their pulp gives the ice cream a dense, smooth texture.
Cream
Supplies fat, which makes the frozen ice cream rich and smooth rather than icy.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer when frozen.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus aroma that balance the sweetness of the prunes and sugar.

The step that matters

Press the fruit through a sieve. Any skin, stones or fibres left in the pulp will give a gritty, uneven texture in the finished ice cream. Pressing the cooked fruit fully smooths the pulp.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes