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Cream Sherbet

A chilled lemon-flavored custard dessert made with lemon rind, sugar, milk, and cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavourings

  1. Boil the yellow rind of the lemons in 1 pint of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix the lemon juice with 4 cups of sugar.

Make the milk base

  1. Scald 2 quarts of milk, then add 2 tablespoons of cornstarch dissolved in a little cold milk and 1 cup of sugar.

Freeze and serve

  1. Let the mixture cool, then partly freeze it.

  2. Stir in the lemon syrup and water.

  3. Freeze hard and serve in sherbet cups.

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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Milk
Provides fat and milk solids for a creamy, rich texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen sherbet softer and easier to scoop.
Cornstarch
Thickens the scalded milk and helps keep the frozen texture smooth.
Lemons
Supply acidity and citrus aroma, with the rind flavouring the syrup.

The step that matters

Stir in the lemon syrup after the base cools and partly freezes. Acid added to hot milk can make it curdle and separate. Cooling and partly freezing the base first keeps it smooth when the lemon syrup is blended in.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. 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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