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Dessert

Strawberry Sherbet

A frozen dessert made from mashed strawberries, raspberries, lemon juice, sugar, and water, optionally folded with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Strawberry Sherbet

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and mash the strawberries, then press them through a sieve into a bowl.

  2. Add the lemon juice, raspberries, sugar, and water to the bowl and mix well.

  3. Let the mixture sit for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid.

  2. For a richer ice, use 1½ pints of water instead of 1½ quarts and fold in the beaten egg whites when the mixture is partly frozen.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and colour, with pulp that gives body to the sherbet.
Sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and balances the sweetness.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add air and a lighter, richer texture to the frozen ice.

The step that matters

Dissolving the sugar before freezing. Sugar must fully dissolve in the juice and water. Undissolved sugar leaves grainy crystals, and the sugar level also controls how soft and scoopable the frozen sherbet becomes.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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