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Dessert

Mrs. Dearborn's Sherbet

A frozen dessert made with sugar, water, raisins, gelatin, fruit syrup, orange and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Mrs. Dearborn's Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour the syrup over the raisins.

  3. Cool the mixture.

Add the gelatine

  1. Soak gelatine in cold water for 5 minutes.

  2. Strain the soaked gelatine.

  3. Dissolve the gelatine in hot water.

  4. Add the dissolved gelatine to the cold syrup.

  5. Strain the mixture again.

Freeze

  1. Mix in fruit syrup, orange juice, and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the mixture into a freezer.

  3. Freeze until mushy.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the mixture so the frozen sherbet keeps a smooth, soft texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping it softer when frozen.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruit flavour to the sherbet.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Freeze until mushy. Freezing should be stopped at a mushy, partly frozen stage. Freezing fully solid makes large ice crystals and a hard, grainy texture rather than a smooth sherbet.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

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