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Dessert

Apple Water Ice and Sherbet

A chilled apple dessert made with boiled apples, water, sugar, lemon, and egg meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Water Ice and Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Peel, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. In a pot, combine the apples, sugar, and water; boil until a pulp forms.

  3. Add the grated lemon rind to the boiling mixture.

Strain and freeze

  1. Cool the mixture, then strain through cheesecloth.

  2. Stir in the lemon juice and freeze.

Make the sherbet

  1. For sherbet, fold in the egg meringue and pack away to ripen.

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.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples
Cooked into a pulp that gives the ice its body and fruit flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the apples.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oils to the flavor.
Egg
Its meringue whipped into the sherbet adds air and a lighter texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg meringue. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the meringue. Stirring hard deflates it, which makes the sherbet dense instead of light.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

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