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Dessert

Berry Sherbet

Berry Sherbet is a frozen fruit beverage made from berries, sugar, water, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Berry Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Mash the berries to make 1 pint of juice.

  2. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. Mix in the water and lemon juice.

  4. Press the mixture through cheesecloth.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid.

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

Berries
Provide the main flavor, color, and juice for the sherbet base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen mixture from freezing too hard.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the berry flavor.

The step that matters

Stir the sugar until fully dissolved. Undissolved sugar crystals stay gritty and do not blend into the liquid, so the frozen sherbet can turn out coarse and uneven in texture.

“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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