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Dessert

Orange Sherbet

A frozen dessert made from orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, water, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Orange Sherbet

Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in a little of the water for about an hour.

  2. Pour the soaked gelatine over 1 cup of boiling water.

Mix and freeze

  1. Add the juice of the oranges and lemon, the sugar, and the remaining water.

  2. Freeze the 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Gelatine
Sets the mixture and gives the frozen dessert a firmer, more cohesive body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Oranges
Supply most of the liquid, sweetness and orange flavour.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Pour the soaked gelatine over boiling water. Gelatine must dissolve completely in hot water; if it is not fully dissolved, it can leave lumps or stringy specks and set unevenly in the frozen mixture.

“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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