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Effervescing Lemonade

A fizzy lemonade made with lemon juice, spring water, sugar, and baking soda.

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 ↓

Effervescing Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lemonade

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Add the spring water and sugar to the lemon juice.

  3. Stir until the sugar dissolves.

Foam and drink

  1. Pour half of the mixture into a tumbler.

  2. Add the baking soda to the tumbler and stir.

  3. Drink while it foams.

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

Lemons
Their juice supplies the acid that reacts with the baking soda and gives the drink its sharpness.
Baking soda
Reacts with the lemon acid to release carbon dioxide, creating the foam and fizz.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharp lemon juice.

The step that matters

Drink while it foams. The carbon dioxide bubbles form when the baking soda meets the lemon acid and escape from the liquid over time, so the fizz fades quickly and the drink should be served right away.

“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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