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Dessert

To Make a Quart of Lemon Water Ice

A frozen dessert made by freezing lemon juice, sugar, water, and ice with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Make a Quart of Lemon Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavour base

  1. Rub a few lumps of sugar on the lemon peels to extract essence.

  2. Squeeze the juice of the lemons through a fine sieve into a bowl with the sugar.

  3. Add enough water to fill the mold, plus a little extra for freezing.

Freeze the mixture

  1. Pour the mixture into the freezer and cover it with the lid.

  2. Turn the freezer handle to begin freezing for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the lid and scrape down the ice that adheres to the sides with a spatula.

  4. Replace the lid and freeze for another 15 minutes.

  5. Remove the lid, scrape down the ice again, and beat it with the spatula until smooth.

  6. Add more rough ice and salt to the pail if needed, and continue freezing until firm.

Pack the mold

  1. Prepare the mold by placing a piece of paper on top, filling it with ice, and pressing it down tightly.

  2. Cover with another piece of paper and the lid to prevent salt water from entering.

  3. Immerse the mold in a pail or tub filled with broken ice and plenty of salt.

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 + 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

Lemons
Provide the juice and peel oil that give the water ice its sour, aromatic flavour.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice softer to eat.

The step that matters

Beating the ice until smooth during freezing. Stirring and scraping break up ice crystals as they form. Skipping this lets large crystals grow, giving a coarse, icy texture instead of a smooth one.

“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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