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Dessert

To Make Sherbet for Punch

A citrus sherbet made with lemon, Seville orange, sugar, and water, then flavored with spirits and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Make Sherbet for Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Rub the outer rind of the lemon and orange onto the sugar pieces.

  2. Add the thin peel of another lemon.

Make the sherbet

  1. Place the sugar in a bowl with a small quantity of boiling water.

  2. Add the juice of the lemons and orange along with a little more boiling water.

  3. Stir well, allow to cool, then add spirits, wine, and water to taste.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 sherbet and dissolves to carry the citrus oils from the rind into the liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sugar's sweetness.
Seville orange
Adds bitter-tart citrus flavour and aroma from its juice and rind.
Lemon peel
Supplies aromatic citrus oils that give the sherbet its fragrance.

The step that matters

Rubbing the rind into the sugar. The aromatic oils sit in the thin outer zest, and rubbing it into the sugar lifts them onto the crystals. When the sugar dissolves, those oils flavour the liquid. Rubbing too little leaves the drink tasting flat, and including the white pith adds bitterness.

“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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