Name: Lemonade
Ingredients: 6 lemons; 1 cup sugar; 3 pints boiling water; crushed ice

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 ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

6 lemons
1 cup sugar
3 pints boiling water
crushed ice

Directions

Peel the rind off the lemons very thinly and place it in a jug.
Squeeze out the juice of the lemons and add it to the jug.
Add the sugar and boiling water to the jug.
Cover the jug and let it cool.
Strain the mixture and serve over crushed ice.

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.

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

Lemons: Juice supplies the sharp acidity, and the thin rind adds aromatic oils.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

“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.