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Dessert

Lemon Sorbet

A frozen dessert made from lemon and orange juice, sugar, egg whites, Marsala wine, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lemon Sorbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Heat the loaf sugar and 3 pints of water in a saucepan until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and reduce the boil slightly.

  3. Skim off any foam.

Add the citrus and cool

  1. Add the grated rind of 2 lemons and the juice of the lemons and oranges.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil again.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  4. Partially freeze the cooled mixture.

Finish the sorbet

  1. Fold in the whisked egg whites, castor sugar, and Marsala wine.

  2. Continue freezing until the desired consistency is reached.

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

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

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Orange + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 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).

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

Egg whites
Whisked and folded in, they add a light, airy texture to the frozen sorbet.
Loaf sugar
Dissolved in water to make the syrup, giving sweetness and helping keep the sorbet smooth.
Lemons
Provide the juice and rind that give the sorbet its tart, bright acidity and aroma.
Marsala wine
Adds flavour and aroma to the sorbet base when folded in near the end.

The step that matters

Partially freezing before folding in the egg whites. The base must be partly frozen, not solid or liquid, so the whisked egg whites and castor sugar can be folded in and hold air. Freezing fully first would prevent folding, and adding them to a liquid base would make the mixture thin and dense.

“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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