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Lemonade Liqueur

A homemade lemonade liqueur made by steeping lemon peels in sugar and water, then adding lemon juice.

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 ↓

Lemonade Liqueur

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the lemon peels against a piece of sugar.

  2. Place the grated sugar in an earthenware basin.

Make the liqueur

  1. Add the juice of the lemons to the sugar.

  2. Gradually add the water and stir until the sugar is completely melted.

Serve

  1. Fill glasses or bottles with the mixture.

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

Lemon peels
Supply aromatic oils that flavour the liquid with lemon fragrance.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves into the water to balance the lemon's acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity and fresh lemon flavour to the liquid.
Water
Dilutes the flavourings and dissolves the sugar into a drinkable liquid.

The step that matters

Grating the peel against the sugar. Rubbing the peel into the sugar lifts the aromatic oils from the zest's outer layer and spreads them through the crystals, so the flavour carries into the liquid. Grating too deep reaches the bitter white pith, which adds unwanted bitterness.

“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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