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Dessert

Ices, Creams, Sherbets, Etc

A chilled dessert made from boiled apples, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, and folded with stiff egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Ices, Creams, Sherbets, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple base

  1. Peel and slice the apples, then place them in a saucepan with water, lemon juice, lemon peel, cinnamon, bay leaves, and sugar.

  2. Boil until soft, then strain through a fine sieve and let cool.

  3. Once cool, freeze the mixture.

Add the egg whites and freeze

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the cooled apple mixture.

  3. Pour into a freezer and let it set.

Make the orange ice

  1. For the orange ice, boil sugar in water, skimming as needed, then let cool and add orange juice.

  2. Freeze the orange mixture until solid.

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. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  5. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking apples
Provide the main fruit flavour and body of the apple base once cooked and strained.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks, they add airy lightness to the frozen mixture.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple base and helps keep the frozen texture softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet apple flavour.
Orange juice
Provides the acidity and citrus flavour of the orange ice.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Beaten egg whites hold air only if folded in gently; overmixing knocks out the air bubbles, leaving a dense, less light frozen texture.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, cinnamon, sugar, orange, 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.

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