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Dessert

Canton Sherbet

A chilled ginger, orange, and lemon sherbet made with water, sugar, and preserved ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Canton Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 4 cups of water with 1½ cups of sugar until dissolved.

  2. Cool the syrup, then add 1 cup of orange juice and 1 cup of lemon juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in ½ cup of syrup from preserved ginger and ½ cup of chopped preserved ginger.

  2. Freeze the mixture and serve in punch cups.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Syrup + gingertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together950 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the sherbet and keeps it from freezing rock-hard.
Orange juice
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour along with body to the frozen mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Preserved ginger
Adds spicy, aromatic flavour and a chewy texture through the chopped pieces and their syrup.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup before adding the juices. Adding juice to hot syrup can dull its fresh flavour and loses the bright citrus character. Cooling it first keeps the juices tasting fresh before the mixture is frozen.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Orangethe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, syrup, ginger. 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.

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