Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Sherbet

A frozen apple dessert made with apples, water, orange and lemon juice, sugar, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Apple Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple base

  1. Boil the apples in water until soft.

  2. Mash the apples through a sieve.

  3. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and water. Mix well.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture until it becomes slushy.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg white.

  3. Finish freezing.

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. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 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
Provide the main fruit flavor and body once cooked and pressed through a sieve.
Sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and lowers its freezing point so it stays soft and scoopable.
Egg white
Beaten in at the end to add a light, airy texture to the frozen mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten egg white. Stirring it vigorously knocks out air, which reduces the light, airy texture the egg white is meant to add.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, 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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes