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Dessert

Lemon Sherbet

A chilled lemon-flavored sherbet made from water, sugar, lemon juice, and grated rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Lemon Sherbet

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Grate the yellow rind from the lemons carefully.

  2. In a pot, combine the water, sugar, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Boil the mixture for 25 minutes.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add the lemon juice and strain the mixture.

  2. Freeze the strained mixture until solid.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and helps keep it smooth when frozen.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavor.
Water
Dissolves the sugar and forms the liquid base of the sherbet.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 25 minutes. Boiling the water, sugar and rind together dissolves the sugar fully and extracts lemon oil from the rind, building the flavor base before the juice is added.

“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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