Skip to main content
Dessert

Boston Sherbet

A frozen raspberry and lemon sherbet flavored with maraschino liqueur and cherries, finished with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raspberry and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Boston Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine raspberry juice, lemon juice, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Stir in maraschino liqueur and freeze the mixture.

  3. Once frozen, mix in chopped maraschino cherries.

  4. Fold in the egg white until well combined.

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. Raspberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Raspberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

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

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

Raspberry juice
Provides the main liquid and fruit flavor that forms the body of the sherbet.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the sherbet softer.
Maraschino liqueur
Adds aroma and flavor, and its alcohol keeps the frozen mixture from freezing rock hard.
Egg white
Adds airy lightness when folded in, giving the sherbet a smoother, fluffier texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg white until well combined. Egg white holds air when gently folded into a chilled base. Overmixing deflates it and makes the texture dense, while underfolding leaves streaks of white in the sherbet.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Raspberrythe original

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesRaspberry JamRaspberry Jam150 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes