Skip to main content
Drink

Sherry Cobbler

A chilled fruit cocktail with sherry, citrus, pineapple, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Sherry Cobbler

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cobbler

  1. In a pitcher, combine the sugar, lemon, orange, and minced pineapple.

  2. Add the pounded ice, cover the pitcher, and shake vigorously for 1 minute.

  3. Pour in the ice water and stir for 1 minute.

  4. Add the sherry or Catawba and stir well.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, adding strawberries and cucumber 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. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

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

  5. Pineapple + cucumbertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sherry and citrus acidity.
Lemon
Provides acidity and bright citrus aroma from the peel and slices.
Sherry or catawba
Gives the wine base its body, flavor, and mild alcohol content.
Pounded ice
Chills the drink and dilutes it slightly as it melts.

The step that matters

Shake the pounded ice with the fruit. Shaking vigorously for the full minute chills the mixture quickly and dissolves the sugar into the juices, so the drink tastes evenly sweet rather than gritty and watery.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

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