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Dessert

Lemon Sherbet, with White of Egg

A chilled lemon sherbet made with boiling water, sugar, lemon juice, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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, with White of Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Spread part of the sugar on a shallow plate.

  2. Wipe the lemons with a clean, damp cloth and roll them in the sugar to extract the oil.

  3. Cut the lemons in half, remove the seeds, and squeeze out the juice.

Make the sherbet

  1. Boil the sugar and water until clear, removing the foam as it rises.

  2. Add the lemon juice to the syrup and gradually pour it into the beaten egg white.

  3. Freeze the mixture as usual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lemons
Provide the juice for tartness and the peel oil for aroma.
Sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and forms the syrup that sets its texture.
Egg white
Beaten to foam, it adds lightness and body to the frozen mixture.

The step that matters

Pouring the syrup into the beaten egg white. Pouring gradually while the white is beaten keeps the foam stable and lets the syrup blend in evenly. Dumping it in at once can deflate the foam, leaving a denser, less airy sherbet.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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