Skip to main content
Drink

Sherbet Fizz

A chilled sherbet made from orange and lemon juice, sugar, egg white, and ice, served over ginger ale with mint.

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

Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Sherbet Fizz

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil hot water and sugar for 10 minutes.

  2. Cool the mixture, then add the juice of the lemons and oranges.

Freeze and ripen

  1. Freeze the mixture using 3 parts ice to 1 part salt.

  2. When half frozen, add the beaten egg white.

  3. Pack in ice and salt for 2 to 3 hours to ripen.

Serve

  1. Half fill a glass with the sherbet and pour over chilled ginger ale.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped mint leaves and serve.

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. Orange + lemontop 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. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whipped into the partly frozen mixture to add lightness and a smoother, airier texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers its freezing point, keeping the sherbet soft rather than rock-hard.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Oranges
Add juice and natural sweetness, giving body and fruity flavour to the base.

The step that matters

Adding the egg white when half frozen. If the mixture is too liquid or fully frozen, the beaten egg white will not blend in evenly, so the texture turns out uneven rather than light and smooth.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Mintthe original

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