Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Sherbet

A frozen dessert made with milk, cream, eggs, bananas, sugar, lemon juice, and lemon Jello.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Banana Sherbet

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 ↓

Banana Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Combine milk, cream, eggs, and sugar in a bowl; mix well.

  2. Add sliced bananas and lemon juice; stir to combine.

  3. Dissolve lemon Jello in hot water and add to the mixture.

Chill and freeze

  1. Chill the mixture in the refrigerator until ready to freeze.

  2. Freeze the mixture according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

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

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

  2. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add richness and help give the custard-like base body and structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the sherbet softer.
Bananas
Add flavour, body and natural sweetness to the base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen texture smoother and richer.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, egg, banana, 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes