Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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
Prepare the lemons
Shave off the peel from 2 lemons in thin, wafer-like parings, avoiding the bitter white pith.
Cut the remaining lemons in half, remove the seeds, and squeeze out the juice.
Make the syrup base
Place the parings in a bowl, add the boiling water, and let it stand covered for 10 minutes.
Add the lemon juice and sugar to the water mixture, adjusting sugar to taste.
Chill and freeze
Once cold, strain through a fine strainer into a container and freeze.
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.
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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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
- Lemons
- Supply the juice for tartness and the peel parings for aromatic lemon oil.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the sourness of the lemon juice.
- Boiling water
- Extracts flavour from the lemon peel and dissolves the sugar.
The step that matters
Avoid the white pith when shaving the peel. The white pith under the zest is bitter. Thin parings of only the yellow outer peel keep the sherbet tasting clean and bright rather than harsh.
“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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