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Drink

Lemon Cordial

A distilled lemon spirit sweetened with sugar and optionally colored yellow.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Lemon Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse and distill

  1. Infuse the rind of 30 lemons in 10 quarts of double proof spirit for 3 days.

  2. Distill the mixture to obtain 6 quarts of lemon spirit.

  3. Add 2 quarts of water to the 6 quarts of lemon spirit.

  4. Distill again to obtain 4 quarts of fine lemon spirit.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Dissolve 10 pounds of sugar in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Combine the lemon spirit with the sugar solution.

  3. Color the mixture yellow if desired.

  4. Filter the cordial.

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).

  2. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + spirittop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together256 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Lemons
Their rind supplies the volatile oils that give the cordial its lemon aroma and flavour.
Double proof spirit
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour and aroma from the lemon rind during infusion.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, softening the strong alcohol and balancing the citrus.

The step that matters

Distill again to obtain 4 quarts of fine lemon spirit. Distillation separates volatile aromatic compounds from the rind and spirit. Heating too hard or too long can carry over bitter or off flavours, so the cut must be controlled to keep the spirit clean and fragrant.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, sugar. 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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