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Dessert

Milk Sherbet

A chilled dessert made from milk, sugar, and lemon juice, frozen until solid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Milk Sherbet

Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Milk Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the milk into the freezer and let it stand until very cold.

Make and freeze

  1. Mix the sugar and lemon juice, then add to the cold milk.

  2. Freeze the mixture until solid.

Serve

  1. Serve with candied ginger or fresh or preserved fruits.

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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Milk
Provides the creamy base and body of the frozen dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the dessert and lowers the freezing point so it stays softer.
Lemons
Add acidity and flavour, and their juice curdles the milk into a fine texture.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice and sugar to the cold milk. Acid from the lemon juice curdles milk when it is added, so the mixture can look split. Keeping the milk very cold and adding the juice steadily helps the curds stay fine as the mixture freezes.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. 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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