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Dessert

A Good Sherbet

A chilled fruit sherbet made from orange, lemon, pineapple juice, sugar syrup, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

A Good Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar together, skimming off the scum.

  2. Set aside to cool.

Make the mixture

  1. Squeeze juice from the oranges and lemons.

  2. Grate the rind of 4 lemons and 2 oranges, and add to the juice.

  3. Combine the juice mixture with the cooled syrup.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Freeze

  1. 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egg whites
Whipped stiff and folded in, they add airy lightness to the frozen texture.
Sugar
Dissolved into the water, it sweetens the sherbet and keeps it softer when frozen.
Oranges
Their juice and rind supply the main citrus flavor and aroma.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavor.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air only when beaten stiff. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air in the mixture so the frozen sherbet stays light instead of dense.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

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