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Dessert

Lemon Sherbet No. 1

A chilled lemon-flavored sherbet made from lemon peel, juice, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Grate the yellow peel off 8 lemons, avoiding the bitter white part.

  2. Place the peels in a stone jar, pour 2 quarts of boiling water over them, cover, and let sit for 10 minutes.

  3. Squeeze the juice from all the lemons and strain it into the jar.

  4. Add the remaining boiling water and sugar to the jar, then strain everything carefully.

Freeze

  1. Once cooled, proceed to freeze the mixture.

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

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

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

Sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and lowers its freezing point so it stays softly textured.
Lemons
Supply the acidity and aroma; the peel adds fragrant oils and the juice adds tartness.

The step that matters

Steeping the peel in boiling water. Lemon peel holds aromatic oils and some bitter compounds. Ten minutes in hot water draws out the fragrance; the white pith is avoided because it adds bitterness.

“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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