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Drink

Cow's Milk and Lime Water

A chilled beverage made from cow's milk, lime water, and sugar water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cow's Milk and Lime Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. To make sugar water, dissolve 17¾ drachms of milk sugar in 1 pint of water.

  2. Store the sugar water in a cool place and use within a few days after dissolving.

Combine

  1. Combine ⅓ cup cream, ⅓ cup average milk, ⅔ cup lime water, and ¾ cup sugar water in a bottle.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Milk + limetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together700 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cream
Adds fat, which gives the mixture richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Lime water
Provides calcium hydroxide, an alkaline base that shapes the mixture's character.
Milk sugar
Provides sweetness and dissolves to form the sugar water.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, milk, sugar. 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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