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Dessert

Lemon Sherbet

A frozen lemon dessert made with lemon peel, juice, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Lemon Sherbet

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shave the peel from two lemons into thin, wafer-like parings, avoiding the lighter colored rind below the oil cells.

  2. Place the parings in a bowl, add the boiling water, and let it stand covered for 10 minutes.

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

Make the syrup

  1. Add the lemon juice and sugar to the water.

  2. Adjust the sugar to taste.

  3. Cook until it forms a syrup.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine strainer into a can.

Freeze

  1. 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.

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

Sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves into the syrup, balancing the lemon's acidity.
Lemons
Supply the juice for tartness and the peel for aromatic oils.

The step that matters

Adjust the sugar to taste. Sugar balances the tartness of the lemon juice and affects how smooth and firm the frozen sherbet becomes, so the sweetness should be checked before freezing.

“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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