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Dessert

Banana Sherbet

A frozen dessert made from bananas, sugar, water, lemon, orange, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Banana Sherbet

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 ↓

Banana Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together for 5 minutes, then let cool.

Combine and freeze

  1. Add lemon juice and orange juice to the mixture.

  2. Stir in the mashed bananas until well combined.

  3. Freeze the mixture until it begins to thicken.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites and freeze like ice cream.

Serve

  1. Serve in glasses, garnished with a cherry on top.

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.

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

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

  2. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the boiled water to form a syrup that sweetens the sherbet and softens its texture.
Ripe bananas
Provide the main flavour, sweetness, and body of the sherbet.
Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture to add air and a lighter, fluffier texture when frozen.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and citrus aroma that complements the bananas.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Whites must be beaten to soft peaks and folded gently so the air is kept; deflating them makes the frozen dessert dense rather than light.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange, 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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