Skip to main content
Dessert

Frozen Sherbet

A frozen lemon sherbet made with water, sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, and flavored sugar.

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

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 ↓

Frozen Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavored sugar

  1. Rub the 6 lumps of sugar on the lemon rinds until the sugar is yellow to extract flavor.

Make the mixture

  1. Combine the flavored sugar with the water and the remaining sugar in a pot.

  2. Squeeze and strain the lemon juice.

  3. Stir the juice into the water mixture.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezer and freeze until half frozen.

  2. Add the well-beaten egg whites and finish freezing.

  3. Pack the sherbet well with salt and ice to prevent melting.

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

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Egg whites
Whipped whites add air and a light, fluffy texture to the frozen sherbet.
Sugar
Sugar lowers the freezing point and adds sweetness, keeping the sherbet softer when frozen.
Lemon juice
Provides the acidity and bright citrus flavor that defines the sherbet.

The step that matters

Add the egg whites after half freezing. Whites added to a mixture that is already partly frozen hold their air better, giving a lighter texture. Adding them too early, when the mixture is still liquid, lets the air collapse and the texture turn dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes