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Drink

Hot Lemonade

A hot beverage made by steeping lemon pieces in boiling water with sugar.

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

Hot Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut up the whole lemon.

  2. Add the lemon pieces to a heatproof container.

  3. Stir in 1 cup of white sugar.

  4. Pour boiling water over the mixture.

  5. Stir until the sugar dissolves.

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 + 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

Whole lemon
Provides the acidic, aromatic citrus flavour that defines the drink.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Stir until the sugar dissolves. Sugar dissolves much faster in hot water than in cold, but undissolved crystals settle at the bottom and leave the drink unevenly sweet. Keep stirring until no grains remain visible.

“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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