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Lemonade

A chilled spiced lemonade made with apples, raisins, cinnamon, bay leaves, and citrus zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Lemonade

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 ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the base

  1. Mash, quarter, and core the apples.

  2. Put apples, raisins, bay leaves, and cinnamon into a kettle.

  3. Add 2 quarts of water and bring to a boil.

  4. Dissolve sugar and grated rind in 2 quarts of cold water, then add to the kettle.

  5. Simmer slowly for half an hour, then strain.

Chill and serve

  1. When cool, add the juice of the lemons and oranges.

  2. Set on ice until very cold.

  3. Put shaved ice into sherbet cups, fill with cold lemonade, and serve.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Cook down to give the syrup body and a tart, fruity flavour.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and balances the tartness of the fruit and citrus.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavour to the chilled drink.
Raisins
Add sweetness and soft body as they simmer in the liquid.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavour that carries through the lemonade.

The step that matters

Add the citrus juice only after cooling. Fresh citrus juice loses its bright aroma and fresh flavour when boiled. Adding it once the mixture has cooled keeps the lemonade tasting lively.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Cranberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

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