Skip to main content
Drink

Portable Lemonade

A sweetened lemon drink made by boiling lemon pulp with water and sugar, then straining and mixing with water.

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

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 ↓

Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Roll the lemons on the table to release more juice.

  2. Press the juice into a bowl.

  3. Strain out the seeds.

Make the syrup

  1. Remove the pulp from the lemon peels.

  2. Boil the pulp in 1 pint of water for a few minutes to remove the acid.

  3. Strain the boiled water into the bowl with the lemon juice.

  4. Add 1 pound of sugar to the mixture.

  5. Boil for 10 minutes.

Bottle and serve

  1. Bottle the syrup and store it.

  2. Mix 1 to 2 teaspoons of syrup with a glass of water.

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

Lemons
Provide the juice that gives the drink its sour, acidic flavor.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the syrup that balances the lemon's sourness.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes. Sugar must fully dissolve into the hot liquid, and boiling thickens the syrup as water evaporates. Stopping too early can leave grainy or thin syrup, while boiling too long makes it overly concentrated and sweet.

“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.

More lemonade recipes

Egg 62Flaxseed 48Milk 35Pineapple 20Hot 16Irish Moss 13 See all 251 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes