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Dessert

Lemon Ice

A chilled lemon-flavored dessert made with lemon juice, sugar, water, and optional egg whites and milk punch.

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

Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Ice

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Combine lemon juice, sugar, and water in a bowl.

  2. Slice the yellow part of the lemon rind and add it to the mixture.

  3. Let the mixture stand until highly flavored.

Freeze and serve

  1. Strain the mixture into a freezer without pressing.

  2. If you want it white, add the beaten egg whites when the mixture is partly frozen.

  3. For a Roman punch, add 2 tablespoons of milk punch to each glass before serving.

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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

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

Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the flavor of the ice.
Sugar
Sweetens the ice and lowers the freezing point so it stays soft rather than rock hard.
Egg whites
Whipped whites add air and a lighter, whiter texture to the frozen ice.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites. Egg whites must be beaten and added only when the mixture is partly frozen. Adding them to a liquid mix lets them separate, and the air they hold collapses, so the texture turns out dense rather than light.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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