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Drink

Lemonade

A beverage made by mixing lemon juice and sugar, boiling coffee grounds, and serving with sweet cream.

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

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemon syrup

  1. Mix ½ cup lemon juice with ½ pound sugar until dissolved.

Brew and serve

  1. For coffee, place 1½ pints of ground coffee in a coarse white flannel bag and tie it an inch above the coffee.

  2. Boil the bag in a four-quart tin coffee pot.

  3. Serve with 1 pint of sweet cream.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + coffeetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together578 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 juice
Adds sourness and bright citrus flavor that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves into the lemon juice to make a syrup.
Ground coffee
Provides the coffee flavor, aroma, and bitterness.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and softens the sharpness of the lemon and bitterness of the coffee.

The step that matters

Boil the bag in the coffee pot. Boiling extracts flavor from the grounds quickly, and leaving the coffee in too long pulls out bitter compounds, making the drink harsh.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, coffee, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, coffee, cream. 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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