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Lemon Sherbet

A chilled lemon-flavored sweet made by boiling sugar and water, adding lemon juice, and freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Lemon Sherbet

Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Lemon Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together for 10 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add lemon juice and stir well.

  2. Freeze the mixture until solid.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and dissolves into the syrup, balancing the sourness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour that defines the sherbet.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup and sets the liquid volume that freezes into the sherbet.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding lemon juice. Adding acidic juice to hot syrup can cause the mixture to lose flavour and clarity, and the cooled base freezes more evenly into a smooth texture.

“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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