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Drink

Strawberry Juice

A chilled beverage made by heating strawberries, straining, adding lemon juice, sweetening, and diluting with water.

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

Strawberry Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Heat the strawberries in a saucepan until just below boiling.

  2. Strain the mixture to extract the juice.

Flavor and store

  1. Add the juice of one lemon to the strawberry juice.

  2. Sweeten and dilute with water according to your taste.

  3. Store in a cool place to maintain flavor and color.

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

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and most of the red color of the juice.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor and balances sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the fruit and lemon.

The step that matters

Heating the strawberries just below boiling. Gentle heat softens the fruit and releases its juice. Boiling can dull the fresh strawberry flavor and fade the bright red color, so stop heating before the mixture boils.

“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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