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Dessert

Lemon Sherbet

A frozen lemon dessert made from lemon peel, juice, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Lemon Sherbet

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Lemon Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Shave off the peel from 2 lemons, taking some of the lighter colored rind.

  2. Put the peels into a bowl.

  3. Add the boiling water to the bowl.

  4. Let the mixture stand covered for 10 minutes.

Add the juice

  1. Cut the remaining lemons in half.

  2. Remove the seeds from the lemon halves.

  3. Squeeze out the juice from the lemons.

  4. Add the lemon juice to the water.

  5. Add the sugar to the mixture, adjusting sugar to taste.

Strain and freeze

  1. When cold, strain the mixture through a fine strainer into a can.

  2. Freeze the can.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Lemons
Provide the sour acidity and aroma that define the sherbet's flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the lemon's acidity and softens the frozen texture.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor and aromatic oils from the lemon peel and dissolves the sugar.

“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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