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Dessert

Strawberry Sherbet

A chilled fruit dessert made from strawberries, water, lemon juice, orange flower water, and sugar.

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

Strawberry Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Crush the strawberries to a smooth paste.

  2. Add water, lemon juice, and orange flower water; let stand for 3 hours.

Make the sherbet

  1. Strain the mixture over the sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. Strain again and set in ice for 3 hours before serving.

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. 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

Strawberries
Provide the main flavour and colour, and their pulp gives body to the sherbet.
White sugar
Sweetens the sherbet and lowers its freezing point so it stays softly textured.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavour and balances the sweetness.
Orange flower water
Adds a delicate floral aroma that complements the strawberries.

The step that matters

Dissolving the sugar fully before the second straining. Sugar that is not fully dissolved leaves grainy crystals and uneven sweetness. Sugar also lowers the freezing point, so an incompletely dissolved batch can freeze unevenly in the ice.

“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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