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Dessert

Marlborough Sherbet

A fruit sherbet made with pineapple, raisins, lemon, orange, sherry, nutmeg, and egg whites.

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

Marlborough Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar for 10 minutes to make a syrup.

  2. Pour the syrup over the raisins.

  3. Let the mixture stand until cold.

Freeze

  1. Add the fruit juices and grated nutmeg to the mixture, and mix well.

  2. Place the mixture in the freezer.

  3. Freeze until it reaches a mushy consistency.

  4. Add the sherry wine and beaten egg whites.

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

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add airy lightness to the frozen texture.
Sugar
Dissolved into the syrup, it sweetens the sherbet and keeps it from freezing rock-hard.
Raisins
Soaked in hot syrup, they soften and contribute fruity flavour and body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and sharpens the fruit flavour.

The step that matters

Add the beaten egg whites after the mixture is partly frozen. Stiffly beaten whites are fragile. Folding them into a mixture that is already mushy, rather than fully solid or still liquid, keeps them evenly distributed and preserves their air, giving a lighter texture.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, pineapple, nutmeg, sherry, wine, orange):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, pineapple, nutmeg, sherry, wine, orange. 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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