Skip to main content
Dessert

Pineapple Sherbet

A frozen dessert made with pineapple, fruit juices, sugar, water, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Pineapple Sherbet

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 ↓

Pineapple Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water for 5 minutes.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool, then add the pineapple and strained fruit juices.

Freeze and ripen

  1. When the mixture is partly frozen, fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Finish freezing and let the sherbet stand to ripen for 2 hours.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar 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 lowers its freezing point, keeping the sherbet soft and scoopable.
Egg whites
Whipped foam adds air, giving the frozen sherbet a light, smooth texture.
Pineapple
Provides the main fruit flavor and body of the sherbet.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and sharpens the fruit flavor.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and a citrus aroma that rounds out the pineapple flavor.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites while partly frozen. Folding gently keeps the air in the stiffly beaten whites. Stirring hard or adding them to a fully liquid or fully frozen mixture lets the air escape or the whites fail to blend, leaving a denser sherbet.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes