Name: Lemon Essence
Ingredients: 4 lemons; 1 pound sugar

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 ↓

Lemon Essence

Ingredients

4 lemons
1 pound sugar

Directions

Prepare

Thinly slice the lemons all around.
For every quarter pound of lemon rind, use 1 pound of sugar.

Make the essence

Mix the sugar with the lemon rind as you would for essence of cederata.
Transfer the mixture into a stone jar and seal it tightly.

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.

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: Provide the rind, which supplies the aromatic oils that flavour the essence.
Sugar: Draws moisture out of the rind and sweetens the mixture as it is sealed to steep.

“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.