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Drink

Spiced Lemonade

A citrus drink made with lemon juice, sugar, water, cloves, cinnamon, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons and chip the rind from one.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine the lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, water, cloves, and cinnamon.

  2. Cook until the sugar dissolves and the spices are mixed, adding more water if needed to keep the syrup thin.

  3. Cool the syrup.

Serve

  1. Use ¼ glassful for each serving, filling the glasses with finely chopped 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.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Provide the juice and rind that give the lemonade its sour, aromatic flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart lemon juice and helps form the syrup base.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the lemonade.
Cloves
Adds a warm, pungent aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook until the sugar dissolves. Sugar must fully dissolve in the hot liquid to form a smooth, evenly sweet syrup. Undissolved crystals leave gritty pockets and uneven sweetness in the finished drink.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, cinnamon. 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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