Skip to main content
Drink

Larned Tea Sherbet

A chilled tea-based sherbet flavored with lemon and optional fruit or mint.

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

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 ↓

Larned Tea Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Measure 4 teaspoons of tea into a pitcher.

  2. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the tea and cover it tightly.

  3. Let it steep for 5 minutes.

  4. Strain the tea and cool in a cold place.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place a block of ice in a punch bowl.

  2. Add 1½ cups of sugar to the ice.

  3. Strain 5 tablespoons of lemon juice over the sugar.

  4. Add the cooled tea to the punch bowl.

  5. Just before serving, stir in 1 pint of Apollinaris water.

  6. Garnish with strawberries or orange peel, or add fresh mint sprigs if desired.

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 + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

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

  3. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  4. Orange + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Tea + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tea
Provides the main flavour and aroma of the punch.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and tea flavour.
Apollinaris water
Adds carbonation, giving the punch a lively, fizzy texture.

The step that matters

Cooling the tea before adding it to the punch bowl. Tea steeped in boiling water can turn bitter and cloudy if over-extracted or added hot; straining and cooling it first keeps the flavour clean and stops the ice from melting too quickly.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tea, sugar, lemon, mint):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar, lemon, mint. 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 SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes