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Dessert

Lemor Sherbet

A chilled lemon dessert made with gelatin, sugar, water, and lemon juice.

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

Lemor Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of water until soft.

  2. Add 1 cup of boiling water to dissolve the gelatine.

  3. When cool, strain the mixture.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add 1 lb of sugar, 1 quart of cold water, and the juice of 4-5 lemons.

  2. 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.

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).

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

Gelatine
Sets the frozen mixture softly and gives it a smoother, less icy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture so it is not rock hard.
Lemon juice
Supplies the acidity and bright lemon flavour that define the sherbet.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine. Gelatine must be fully softened and then dissolved in hot water before it is added. Undissolved granules leave gritty or rubbery specks and uneven setting in the frozen sherbet.

“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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