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Dessert

Berry Sherbet

A chilled berry beverage made by crushing berries, steeping, straining, sweetening, and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Berry Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Crush the berries.

  2. Combine the crushed berries, water, lemon slices, and orange flavor in an earthen bowl.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 3 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture, squeezing all the juice from the fruit.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Dissolve the powdered sugar in the strained liquid.

  2. Strain again and chill in the ice until ready to serve.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Berries
Provide the main flavour and colour, and their juice forms the base of the sherbet.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the liquid and dissolves fully into it, balancing the tartness of the fruit and lemon.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the berry flavour.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture, squeezing all the juice from the fruit.. Pressing the fruit extracts the juice that carries most of the flavour and colour. Strain again afterwards so that no pulp or seeds remain, which would make the drink gritty.

“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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