Name: Strawberry Sherbet
Ingredients: 2 quarts strawberries; 2 pounds sugar; 6 lemons; 2 quarts water

Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Strawberry Sherbet

Ingredients

2 quarts strawberries
2 pounds sugar
6 lemons
2 quarts water

Directions

Prepare the strawberry juice

Pour 1 pound of sugar over the strawberries, mash thoroughly, and let stand to extract the juice.
Pass the mixture through a sieve to remove seeds and pulp.

Make the sugar syrup

In a pot, combine the remaining pound of sugar with the water and bring to a boil, then let cool.

Combine and freeze

Add the juice of the lemons and the strained berry juice to the cooled sugar water.
Freeze the mixture.

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.

Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Strawberries: Provide the main fruit flavor and most of the juice that gives the sherbet its body.
Sugar: Sweetens the sherbet and, when dissolved in syrup, lowers the freezing point for a softer texture.
Lemons: Add acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor and balances the sweetness.

“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.