Name: Artificial Lemon Juice
Ingredients: 9 drachms (about 0.5 ounces) crystallized citric acid; 1 pint (2 cups) water; 1 teaspoon essence of lemon; 1 teaspoon spirit

Why it works: Lemon and spirit work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 256 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Artificial Lemon Juice

Ingredients

9 drachms (about 0.5 ounces) crystallized citric acid
1 pint (2 cups) water
1 teaspoon essence of lemon
1 teaspoon spirit

Directions

Dissolve the citric acid in the water.
Add the essence of lemon and spirit.
Stir well to combine.

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 + spirittop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together256 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Crystallized citric acid: Provides the sour, acidic flavor that gives the drink its lemon-like tartness.
Essence of lemon: Adds the lemon aroma and flavor that the acid alone does not supply.
Spirit: Helps carry and blend the lemon essence evenly into the water.

“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.