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Dessert

Strawberry, Raspberry and Currant Sherbets

A chilled fruit sherbet made from strawberry, raspberry, and currant juice, sugar syrup, lemon juice, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Berry and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Strawberry, Raspberry and Currant Sherbets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Squeeze the berries through cheesecloth to extract the juice.

  2. In a pot, boil 2 cups of water and 1½ cups of sugar for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the lemon juice and berry juice to the sugar syrup.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture, adding the egg white just before it is fully frozen.

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. Berry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Berry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Berry juice
Provides the main fruit flavour and colour of the sherbet.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and keeps the frozen texture softer by lowering its freezing point.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the berry flavour.
Egg white
Traps air when beaten into the partly frozen mixture, giving a lighter, smoother texture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg white just before the mixture is fully frozen. If the egg white goes in too early it dilutes the base and does not trap air well, and if the mixture is already solid it cannot be folded in evenly. Timing it at the partly frozen stage lets the white whip into a light, even texture.

Swap the berry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Berrythe original

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