Name: Lemon Syrup
Ingredients: 1 pint strained lemon juice; 1¼ pounds sugar

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 ↓

Lemon Syrup

Ingredients

1 pint strained lemon juice
1¼ pounds sugar

Directions

Make the syrup

In a saucepan, combine 1 pint of strained lemon juice with 1¼ pounds of sugar.
Simmer the mixture until it becomes clear.

Bottle

Once cooled, bottle the syrup and cork it tightly.

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.

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

Strained lemon juice: Provides the sour, acidic flavour that balances the sweetness of the syrup.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and body, and dissolves into the juice to form the syrup.

“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.