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Lime Frappe

A chilled lime and lemon beverage made with sugar, water, and green coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lime Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a kettle, combine 8 pounds of sugar and 4 gallons of water.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Flavour and freeze

  1. Add 1 quart of lime juice, the juice of 18 lemons, and green food coloring.

  2. Freeze the mixture partially or until stiff, depending on how you want to serve it.

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. Lime + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to make a sweet base that softens the sharp citrus.
Lime juice
Provides the main tart, aromatic lime flavour that defines the frappe.
Lemon juice
Adds extra acidity that brightens the sweetness and deepens the citrus flavour.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limethe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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