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Drink

Apple Lemonade

A chilled drink made from boiled apple juice, sugar, lemon juice, water, ice, and garnished with a candied cherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 295 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple syrup

  1. Cook diced apples in enough water to cover until tender.

  2. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag.

  3. Add 1 cup of sugar for each cup of apple juice and bring to a boil.

  4. Cool the apple syrup.

Serve

  1. For each glass, mix ½ cup of apple syrup, the juice of ½ lemon, and water and ice to fill the glass.

  2. Garnish with a candied cherry on top.

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. Apple + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together295 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + cherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Diced apples
Provide the flavour base and juice that becomes the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple juice and thickens it into a syrup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet apple flavour.

The step that matters

Bring the apple juice and sugar to a boil. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully into the juice and concentrates the syrup. Under-boiled syrup stays thin and tastes flat once diluted with water and ice.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cherry. 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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