Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Sherbet

A chilled plum dessert made with plums, water, lemon, sugar, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Plum and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Plum Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the plum base

  1. Wash and stone the plums, then mash them with lemon juice and water.

  2. Sweeten to taste and heat in a double boiler for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve and let it cool.

Finish and freeze

  1. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and freeze.

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. Plum + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Plums
Provide the main fruit flavor and pulp that gives the sherbet its body.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the plum flavor and balances the sweetness.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add air that makes the sherbet light and fluffy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen sherbet.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Beaten egg whites hold air that gives the sherbet its lightness. Fold them in gently and only into the cooled mixture, since heat or heavy stirring will deflate them.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Plumthe original

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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes