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Effervescing Lemonade

A fizzy lemonade made with lemon juice, cold water, sugar, and soda bicarbonate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Effervescing Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and strain it.

  2. Add the lemon juice to the cold water.

Sweeten and fizz

  1. Sweeten the mixture with the sugar and mix well.

  2. Add the carbonate of soda, stir well, and drink while effervescing.

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

Lemon
Its juice adds sharp acidity and bright flavour to the drink.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the lemon's acid to release carbon dioxide, creating the fizz.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.
Cold water
Forms the liquid base and dilutes the juice to a drinkable strength.

The step that matters

Drink while effervescing. Carbon dioxide from the carbonate of soda and acid escapes from the liquid quickly, so the fizz fades within minutes. Stirring it in and drinking right away keeps the bubbles.

“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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